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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

#31

Post by echelon »

api wrote: post #26
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Most of the people who go nuts when you point these things out are FOSS zealots reacting to the idea that FOSS licenses should be adjusted to prevent billion dollar companies from co-opting it for profit.

Profit is fine. Building anti-competitive monopolies that don't share and that seek to own more and more of computing was an unanticipated side effect.

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

#32

Post by vhold »

detaro wrote: post #15
slownews45 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but we don't care that Tivo's are locked down. They literally made the GPLv3 because they cared about that very much.

In case anybody is wondering about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization

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

#33

Post by nescioquid »

senko wrote: post #4

> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust [...]. Activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work. > We will read the submitted white papers, and we will publish ones that we think help elucidate the problem . Doesn't give me hope they're aiming for unbiased opinion. I would be very surprised if any of th…

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 problem?

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

#34

Post by slownews45 »

blendergeek wrote: post #20
slownews45 wrote: post #3

Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…

> The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). The users of the software are the owners of the devices. The distributors are the ones locking down the…

GPL used to be targeted at DEVELOPERS of software - the share and share alike model. These developers would in some cases use the GPL'ed software in locked down devices (many / most android devices are pretty locked down - but developers contribute to a GPL kernel).

So yes, FSF created GPLv3 to focus on USERS freedoms, but the users are not writing the software - so it remains the devs who pick licenses.

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

#35

Post by alpaca128 »

xxpor wrote: post #13
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…

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing fo…

> it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable

Microsoft did not just copy individual lines. They fed whole repositories into their model, ignoring the license (if it exists) even though they knew from the start that information generated by the model will be publicly available. Available usually out of context, but nonetheless - the scope of the input and intent are very clearly "everything" and "redistribution".

Just adding a filter/ML model to the output shouldn't matter. I dare you to build a Copilot clone trained from leaked internal Microsoft code and then trying to argue the output is a bit mixed up.

That is a clear violation imho.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

senko wrote: post #4

> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust [...]. Activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work. > We will read the submitted white papers, and we will publish ones that we think help elucidate the problem . Doesn't give me hope they're aiming for unbiased opinion. I would be very surprised if any of th…

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by simion314 »

slownews45 wrote: post #3

Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…

>And regardless of the FSF attorney stuff, places like china, ....

So your argument is if China does not care about license neither should we, the thing is I am fine with that, I know Windows source code is leaked so let's train an AI on it too

I think is a clear sign that MS did not trained on proprietary code , it means that is not legal or not safe, so the question is why GPL or other licenses are safe, I think you need the authors or the licenses to give you the permission to use the code as training data in black box, locked, proprietary algorithms.

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

#38

Post by ghoward »

xxpor wrote: post #13
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…

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing fo…

You're right that code has to demonstrate creativity for copyright. But that also means that an algorithm, even a transformative algorithm, cannot change copyright because an algorithm is not creative, by definition.

This means that the output of any algorithm on copyrighted code is still under the original copyright. I mean, we still apply the copyright of the original to the output of compilers, even though compilers can be transformative with inlining and link-time optimization, to the point that it mixes disparate code in the same way Copilot does.

In fact, I wrote some software licenses [1] that codify the fact that algorithms cannot change copyright.

[1]: https://yzena.com/licenses/

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

#39

Post by slownews45 »

blendergeek wrote: post #30
slownews45 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 released as an AGPLv3 to be "open source" - but literally the only company with the "super" rights to license / make money off it is the corp dev.

It's kind of genius -> so I think we may see more (A)GPLv3 stuff coming this way. The corp developer can then offer for example a hosted version of the software WITHOUT releasing all the related code! But anyone else would have to release their code.

You an see how this is done here:

https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/cla/

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

#40

Post by slownews45 »

detaro wrote: post #15
slownews45 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but we don't care that Tivo's are locked down. They literally made the GPLv3 because they cared about that very much.

The FSF did GPLv3. The folks doing Linux etc did not.
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