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 matter. Copyright matters.
Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.
> 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.
You seem to be unfamiliar with (edit: or object to) the very idea of lawyers.
I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.
This was the same mentality that brought copyleft to the masses in 1984. While you may not care, there are others who do care about the sanctity of license agreements. This is an argument where staying silent means you accept this approach. Of the millions of open source projects, a large portion of the contributors ARE speaking up because they don't find this to be acceptable. I personally think copilot is the futur…
> Of the millions of open source projects, a large portion of the contributors ARE speaking up because they don't find this to be acceptable.
Is this true? Is there really a large portion of contributors speaking up against this? I got the opposite sense, that it was a very small portion of contributors speaking up against this but I don't have any evidence one way or the other.
> 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.
Read the rest of the paragraph. They think it is unacceptable and unjust from certain perspectives that are trivial for them. However, there are other perspectives that are worth exploring, and that is what this is about.
> 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.
No, they have a position and arguments to support it, but those have nothing to do with the machine learning aspects, just with the fact that the software is proprietary.
They are asking for views on the machine learning, which they do not have arguments or a position on.
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…
RMS is not the dictator of FOSS. There are plenty of valid competing opinions of what "freedom" means and not all of those include legally compelling everyone to share. The MIT license, for example, is both older and more popular than GPL. There has always been a lot of people who do not agree with his opinions.
> 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…
The part you removed is the crucial part that explains that paragraph.
> 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.
If a trained language model exactly reproduces copyrighted text, is there any question about whether copyright still applies?
I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.
That is a valid position one can have.
However other people for varying reasons have other ideas ...
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.
Attention to "in the last year or so". The same link was posted 13-14h ago, not "1 year or so ago".