181–190 of 209 posts
i wonder if they could retrain the model on BSD or MIT licensed code only; How much of the open source code is licensed as GPL vs more permissive licenses, does anyone know?
Interesting that they want to charge for the use of co-pilot, I guess that we will see this business model more in the future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license. That as long as they have the right to read the data, they have the right to train an AI on it. The fact that the code is available under an open source license is irreverent to them. As for why they didn't use their own private code to train their AI, I suspect it was more of a non-maliciou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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....
This is a common misconception: without copyright, Microsoft would still have many legal means to force you to pay for every copy of windows, from contract law to patent licenses. Without copyright there would not be free software and copyleft as we know it.
Patent law is about selling items not consuming them so they could prevent me from selling a clone of office but they cannot prevent me from installing office
as far as contract law that would be between two parties so if I obtained a copy of office somewhere and I did not have a contract with Microsoft nothing I would not be violating a contract with Microsoft copyright is the only mechanism they use to stop unauthorized distribution of their software
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license. That as long as they have the right to read the data, they have the right to train an AI on it. The fact that the code is available under an open source license is irreverent to them. As for why they didn't use their own private code to train their AI, I suspect it was more of a non-maliciou…
How is that conciled with the fact that a person that read copyrighted code (not even the original source code, a mere decompiled version of it !) is forbidden to reimplement it directly:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2585652/reverse-engine...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license. That as long as they have the right to read the data, they have the right to train an AI on it. The fact that the code is available under an open source license is irreverent to them. As for why they didn't use their own private code to train their AI, I suspect it was more of a non-maliciou…
Training is one thing. Regurgitating chunks verbatim without attribution is another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The FSF had lawyers from the beginning and always thought (I talked with RMS in the early 80's some) that enforcement was part of the plan.
Sure, but the GPLv2 was very freedom oriented. Enforcement practically was relatively sparse and more educational I thought. Ie, release the TiVo source code, but we don't care that Tivo's are locked down. Is anyone building strong communities on AGPLv3 / GPLv3? I feel the momentum shifted towards Apache / MIT style licenses unfortunately.
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I'm sure there's an IDE out there which will do that already without any AI. Just need to lint your code, highlight the bad stuff it finds and suggest a refactoring.
Most of them already do, personally, I use SublimeLinter for SublimeText, and LSP support. But linters work with hand crafted static rules, which is good and the idea is not to replace them. The idea is to used big data techniques to find unwritten rules based on commit histories, the idea being that we are more likely to remove bad code than good code. So if your code looks like code that is often removed, is is mos…
There are also other triggers of code removal and refactoring that are outside the code base, such as an organisation migrating to a different platform. An AI trained on a large public commit history could encourage a general shift towards already-established big players, punishing smaller organisations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license. That as long as they have the right to read the data, they have the right to train an AI on it. The fact that the code is available under an open source license is irreverent to them. As for why they didn't use their own private code to train their AI, I suspect it was more of a non-maliciou…
> Microsoft's apparent legal opinion is that training an AI on the data is the same as reading it, and doesn't require a license. How is that conciled with the fact that a person that read copyrighted code (not even the original source code, a mere decompiled version of it !) is forbidden to reimplement it directly: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2585652/reverse-engine...
If a company copies a competitors product then the chance of getting sued is very high. If they can show that, in fact, there was zero copying at all, then they can get the case dismissed and save great legal expense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Training is one thing. Regurgitating chunks verbatim without attribution is another.
In general taking short excerpts of a copyrighted work is legal and is not infringement.
Also, Copilot is copying much more than short excerpts, going as far as to reproduce large amounts of copyrighted code verbatim[1].
[1] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
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.