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GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

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Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#61

Post by fartcannon »

dopaminefasting wrote: post #25
hbz65 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free and open source, assuming I approve of the usage” is a common sentiment among people who paste Apache or MIT and don’t think about the ramifications. It’s increasingly common. I think this situation is slightly more complex but that sentiment is at the heart of a lot of pushback against things like this.

All the people in this thread angry that GitHub is using MIT software in a way permitted by its license... depressing. The MIT license doesn't require attribution for small snippets, only for full copies or substantial portions.

As others have already told you in this thread, substantial portions can mean the few lines of significant algorithm wrapped in boiler plate. So either way, Microsoft would have to prove the MIT code was not substantial.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#62

Post by pessimizer »

ineedasername wrote: post #38

Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem. Otherwise, Into honestly trying to have a conversation on this to understand the objections because I haven't made up my mind but struggle to see the problem. So pease consider the following: if the code was not encumbered by restrictions I don't see an obvious problem with this. Using code or da…

> Can't you host code on GitHub that is not "free" for commercial use? If GitHub scraped these projects then it's a problem.

It did. It's spitting up the AGPL in empty files, and AGPL'd code isn't free for commercial use. It requires people who use it to make changes available under the same license.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#63

Post by pessimizer »

yongjik wrote: post #50

There may be discussions to be made about licenses, but "to watch people cheer at having their work and time exploited by a company worth billions" is a disappointingly myopic take, especially from a developer. Information that is aggregated and organized for easy retrieval is worth more than the sum of individual bits of information. I thought that was common sense. We might as well complain that billionaire superma…

We would, if they weren't required to pay for potatoes.

Are you making a claim that Netflix shouldn't be required to pay for individual movies because they sell a collection of movies?

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#64

Post by hekec »

On their website they say that "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set."

So it won't copypaste your code. It had just read code from open sources and learned from it - similar to what humans do. So I don't see any problem with this.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#65

Post by mcbits »

iotku wrote: post #31
hbz65 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free and open source, assuming I approve of the usage” is a common sentiment among people who paste Apache or MIT and don’t think about the ramifications. It’s increasingly common. I think this situation is slightly more complex but that sentiment is at the heart of a lot of pushback against things like this.

Dev: "Anyone can use my code for any purpose including commercial purposes." $BigCorp: "I want to use to use Dev's code for commercial purposes as he has explicitly granted me the right to do so." Dev: "Wait, no not like that." As much as I am a proponent of permissive licenses (my favorite is the wtfpl), you have to pick your license wisely especially if you're going to be picky about usage (Be it by $BigCorp, gover…

This is why I think AGPL is a reasonable default for personal projects where the dev doesn't want to fuss over licenses or sue anyone, but would be uncomfortable with $BigCorp exploiting their work. Even though it doesn't explicity prohibit them from using it, it tends (or tended) to have that effect.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#66

Post by ghoward »

greatgib wrote: post #60

I'm a big proponent of open source and I'm usually not nice with bad moves of GitHub. For example, i find stupid to use vscode and believe that it is open source when it is a lie. But, in that case, I think that the things that are put to charge GitHub are not right. I think that the idea is nice and it is fair from open source code. Anyone is free of downloading free software and doing something similar, and it is n…

Unfortunately, just because code is open source doesn't mean that there aren't terms of use attached with it. One of the simplest and most widely used terms is attribution.

This means that if Copilot does not attribute code when it copies and modifies it, then it is violating most open source licenses. Full stop.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#67

Post by justbored123 »

I absolutely despise these lot of super entitle people that have absolutely amazing free services provided by companies like GitHub and Google/Youtube and they get all agro because they dared try to monetized or impose some basic rules that don't really affect them at all in any meaningful way.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#68

Post by ghoward »

hekec wrote: post #64

On their website they say that "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set." So it won't copypaste your code. It had just read code from open sources and learned from it - similar to w…

GitHub has 56 million users as of September 2020 (according to Wikipedia). Let's assume that only 1 million of them use Copilot at an average of once a week.

That means that every week, there will be 1000 verbatim copypaste of code by Copilot. Then multiply that by a year or more as Copilot gets older.

0.1% may not seem like a lot, but at the scale of Internet companies, it always is.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#69

Post by jeroenhd »

iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

Open source code still has a license. That license may or may not require distributing the license along with the code. MIT may allow distribution without a license unless the code share is significant, but reusing GPL3 is a no-go for commercial companies.

The Apache 2 license allows for commercial use, but has implications for the way you can enforce your software patents. It also requires distributing the license file along with your application.

Complaining that companies use the software you told the world was free to use without restriction is dumb. However, not everyone gives away their software for free without restrictions. The fact that Github isn't respecting those licenses is a much bigger problem.

The tool autocompleting some random guy's personal information because he uploaded his blog to Github is highly problematic. The idea of using permissively licensed code to train an AI is not bad, but some human with knowledge of software licenses would need to pre-select those projects.

If all code came from one of those "do whatever the fuck you want" licenses, then there wouldn't be a problem. I'd consider it to be a great product and have no issue paying a fee. There's a huge market for a Copilot product, but this iteration just.. isn't it.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#70

Post by ClumsyPilot »

arp242 wrote: post #57
dopaminefasting wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe read the MIT license before you grab the pitchforks: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all COPIES OR SUBSTANTIAL PORTIONS of the Software." Reusing a snippet doesn't require reproducing the MIT license. People who publish MIT software know they're basically giving their code out with basically no strings attached. However, GitHub should be careful with the GPL variety.

What counts as a "substantial portion"? Personally I'd say that a function is substantial, whereas one or two lines would not be.

We can argue that point, but it seems githib in no way is even aware of how substantial their copying is
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