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FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

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Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#141

Post by dcow »

Y_Y wrote: post #93
hartator wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.

Why not both? Copyright certainly matters. It's a big deal legally and economicically all over the world. Suppose that it's just a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Does that mean that I should release my code into the public domain? I think you could make a good case that even being totally opposed to copyright morally or pragmatically or otherwise, given that it currently is enforced in many places it's worthwhile to p…

Exactly. The copyleft side of me says you can't copyright instructions on how to bake a cake, or a fast route across a city, or a beautiful way to display colored pixels in a grid, or an efficient compression scheme for video data... because it's all intellectual, and not physical, "property". But society disagrees so a nice hack on copyright that perpetually keeps any of the above from being stolen and locked down by profit seeking psychopaths just early enough to the scene to make a buck, seems like the best interim solution.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#142

Post by blendergeek »

slownews45 wrote: post #39
blendergeek wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is anyone building strong communities on AGPLv3 / GPLv3? I feel the momentum shifted towards Apache / MIT style licenses unfortunately. While the corporate momentum switched to Apache/MIT licenses, there are strong communities built on AGPLv3/GPLv3. * Nextcloud - file hosting (AGPLv3) * Source Hut - git hosting (AGPLv3) * StreetComplete - OpenStreetMap editing (GPLv3) * F-Droid - Free Software "app store" for andro…

(A)GPLv3 actually has seen some real growth corporate side -> it's used commonly by proprietary tech companies as sort of a poison license (Microsoft had some of these like SSPL). The way this works is all contributors are required to sign a CLA -> the corporate developer can then use their code under ANY license, and most importantly can integrate into propriatery products or sell to others. The code is then release…

> The way this works is all contributors are required to sign a CLA -> the corporate developer can then use their code under ANY license, and most importantly can integrate into propriatery products or sell to others.

If a third party is contributing a lot of code that is highly relevant, the third party is under no obligation to sign the CLA. The third party is entirely within her rights to refuse to sign the CLA and distribute an AGPLv3-only fork of the software.

If this fork is significantly better than the original, the original authors are out of luck when it comes to proprieatary relicensing.

This is what happened with OwnCloud/Nextcloud. OwnCloud was AGPLv3 but required a CLA. OwnCloud became OpenCore and started distributing "enterprise" features as proprietary upgrades. Some developers were unhappy with this and forked OwnCloud and started developing Nextcloud. All contributions to Nextcloud are AGPLv3 only and cannot be re-licensed by Owncloud. Interestingly enough, any new code released under AGPLv3 by Owncloud can still be used by Nextcloud.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#143

Post by dcow »

whazor wrote: post #121

I am curious about the results. Having tested copilot, most suggestions are based on existing code in your opened file. Furthermore, most snippets tend to be relatively short, where it feels more like a Stack Overflow answer than existing code. Of course it is possible to make the model generate longer pieces of code that are potentially GPL. But you would have to do certain effort for it. It also tends to adopt your…

The difference is that Stack Overflow has taken the legal responsibility of making sure any contributions to the site are licensed in a way that allows users to copy-paste them into their own works, and has the authority to do as much. GH does not have the authority to, without authors' permission, launder their code through an AI "tumbler" and spit out shiny suggestions stripped of all license concerns.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#144

Post by dylan604 »

liamwire wrote: post #97
dylan604 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My explanation will not be popular here on HN, but I'm never one to shy away. Especially when asked directly. Buying a book, buying an audio CD, or buying a DVD/Blu-ray is granting the holder permission to read,listen,view that product as a single instance. You can lend them out, but that's all you're really allowed to do with them. The text,audio/video is not owned by you to do with as you please. People obviously d…

> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’? Moving on, I’ll put this to you: you claim training a ML model against copyrighted text is in violation of the ‘permission’ granted by the rights holder. However, flip this on its head for a moment – that’s basically all human brains do. Clearly, the greatest writers of our time haven’t written their works in a vacuum. R…

>> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’?

I totally missed the non-wrapped question.

Because I don't give a crap about down-votes/up-votes. I just know from experience my views on copyright do not gel with the majority views on HN. I was just acknowledging that fact. Conversations can be had regardless of votes. My views on Napster/MP3 trading are in the same realm (and somewhat related with copyright issues). I was a co-owner of a small music site when Napster was in its heyday, and we saw direct repurcussions of people not buy music because they got it from mp3 trading. Group think here is all "things for free when I want it, how i want it", yet I still have conversations. I'm not afraid of a measly -4 points because my thoughts are contrary to group think.

At the same time, if something like this gets your goad, how is asking how something is better being better in and of itself?

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#145

Post by zarzavat »

heavyset_go wrote: post #115
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.

Microsoft (presumably) did train it on their open source repositories, since those repositories are public GitHub repos. They didn't train it on anybody's private repositories.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#146

Post by [deleted] »

senko wrote: post #46
nescioquid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like they have a legal premise and they want to work out the implications, not to open up discussion to every quibble about the FSF's values. Having an opinion on the legal issues around their licenses and values seems sort of essential to what the organization does. The word "unbiased" seems to be doing a lot of heavy work in your comment. The FSF is inherently biased towards its project -- how is that a p…

> The word "unbiased" seems to be doing a lot of heavy work in your comment. The FSF is inherently biased towards its project -- how is that a problem? That's straw-man, I never said (nor do I think) FSF should not be biased towards its project. However, I would be more willing to trust the results of this call if I had confidence that all solid arguments are presented, even if they're not aligned with FSF's agenda.…

[deleted]

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#147

Post by jazzyjackson »

zarzavat wrote: post #145
heavyset_go wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.

Microsoft (presumably) did train it on their open source repositories, since those repositories are public GitHub repos. They didn't train it on anybody's private repositories.

The point is, if they're sure they won't be recycling copyrighted code wholesale, why not include their own in the training set. Surely their internal code is higher quality than the average git repo, which must be 80% abandonware (if my personal repos are anything to go by :P)

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#148

Post by goodpoint »

syshum wrote: post #126
warkdarrior wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing their code altogether.

While True, if you abolish copyright then there is nothing preventing me from Installing Microsoft office on as many machines as I want never paying Microsoft a dime....

Not at all. You are confusing copyright with theft of service or other stuff.

Closed source benefit from the secretiveness of compiled software.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#149

Post by paulryanrogers »

zarzavat wrote: post #145
heavyset_go wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.

Microsoft (presumably) did train it on their open source repositories, since those repositories are public GitHub repos. They didn't train it on anybody's private repositories.

But publicly accessible doesn't mean public domain. Microsoft has shared even some of their private code with others like governments. No doubt with strict licenses which they expect to be honored. AGPL and other licenses on publicly accessible code still matter.

Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

#150

Post by goodpoint »

echelon wrote: post #22
davisr wrote: post #7

The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. For the past ten years we've been spoon fed that it's okay for Open Source / Free Software to be co-opted by giants and subsequently kept private. You'll be harassed for telling people it's wrong for Apple to lock down the iPhone. Or that Google shouldn't be in charge of web standards. Web infrastructure is mostly a bunch of black boxes. How fa…

You are being downvoted because you are right and people are bitter about it.
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