FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by google234123 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #35

xxpor wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

Copilot was trained on leaked internal Microsoft code that's on github at the moment. Anyway, everyone seems perfectly ok with training langauge models on copyright text.

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

#42

Post by zekrioca » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

Interesting: In HN, a same link submitted at a different time get different # of upvotes.

Same link, just 13h ago, but with 5x less upvotes than the one in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27992894

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

#43

Post by ghoward » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

zekrioca wrote: post #42

Interesting: In HN, a same link submitted at a different time get different # of upvotes. Same link, just 13h ago, but with 5x less upvotes than the one in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27992894

Because the US programmers were going to bed?

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

#44

Post by zekrioca » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

ghoward wrote: post #43

zekrioca wrote: post #42

Interesting: In HN, a same link submitted at a different time get different # of upvotes. Same link, just 13h ago, but with 5x less upvotes than the one in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27992894

Because the US programmers were going to bed?

I'd expect HN to not let duplicates to be submitted.

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

#45

Post by ghoward » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

zekrioca wrote: post #44

ghoward wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the US programmers were going to bed?

I'd expect HN to not let duplicates to be submitted.

I see. Well, it actually happens all the time.

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

#46

Post by senko » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

nescioquid wrote: post #33

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 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. Hiding them won't make them disappear - you might as well get as informed as possible about the issue, especially if you care deeply about the issue and agree with the FSF.

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

#47

Post by slownews45 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:28 PM UTC

danhor wrote: post #17

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…

This is more of a tangent, but I found this framing very interesting: > 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 FSF considers the user to be the one using cars/tivo's/other devices. In their view, this was a design flaw of gplv2 that it allowed locking out end-users of their devices. F…

Right - FSF ended up with a user view. Problem was the developers are the one actually writing the code and picking licenses, and the FSF moved away from really talking with them. I think this was a big shift.

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

#48

Post by hartator » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective.

So, why call for white papers? I don’t believe they will publish any papers that go against their views.

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

#49

Post by IvyMike » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

zekrioca wrote: post #44

ghoward wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the US programmers were going to bed?

I'd expect HN to not let duplicates to be submitted.

From the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

> Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.

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

#50

Post by meepmorp » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

hartator wrote: post #48

> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. So, why call for white papers? I don’t believe they will publish any papers that go against their views.

They have a position and they now want to support it with arguments, and they'd like it if people would help them do that.

I think that's a backwards because it's putting the conclusion first then seeking to justify it, but to each their own.