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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

#61

Post by kube-system »

echelon wrote: post #31
api wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there's a single "anti-competitive monopoly" today that has less FOSS involvement than any major software company in the 20th century.

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

#62

Post by dylan604 »

google234123 wrote: post #41
alpaca128 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Everyone is not perfectly OK with training language models on copyrighted text. It's just that evilCorps do it anyways, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. I can't do anything. At best, I could get a Twitter account and complain to the ether. The copyright holders can't do anything against the might evilCorps, but that doesn't make them okay with it. The fact you believe this is just sad, and exactly what evilCorps want from you.

This goes beyond fair use or satirical/comedic effect. They are training their models to output text in the style of the authors being absorbed. The style of is exactly the artistic effect that is being copyrighted.

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

#63

Post by blooalien »

dunham wrote: post #16
grepfru_it wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like this? [GitHub Copilot License Config Menu] Show suggestions with the following tags: - [ ] GPLv3 - [x] GPLv2 - [ ] AGPL - [x] CC-BY-SA - [x] Apache License - [x] MIT License - [ ] No License Attribution

Would that require generating 2^n models or can models be combined?

I would think that to combine the models, the software would need some internal method to differentiate between the licenses used by the various code sources it's pulling it's suggestion "ideas" from, and the compatibility between the licenses of those sources and your own choice of licensing for the project you're creating.

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

#64

Post by IvyMike »

zekrioca wrote: post #60
IvyMike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

They have explicitly stated that are ok with retrying recent overlooked stories just in case a story got missed or buried for whatever reason.

They are also ok with reposting year+ old stories that did get significant attention at the time, since the new respost may find a new audience.

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

#65

Post by lamontcg »

Given how the racist twitterbot AI turned out, along with L4 autonomous driving by 2017, I suspect that Copilot is going to suffer most from an incredibly high velocity of churned out security bugs and bad code. SWEs are probably going to get fired for using it and companies will need to ban it, even if the legal problems don't take it down.

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

#66

Post by lights0123 »

> It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code)

A little nitpicky, but the only proprietary part it requires is the plugin itself, not the IDE—Copilot runs just fine with the Free build of VS Code compiled from source from GitHub, after flipping a switch to enable WIP APIs.

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

#67

Post by c7DJTLrn »

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…

If I ever receive monetary compensation for violation of the license on my repositories, I will personally deliver it to you in cash. It won't happen.

I have a feeling Copilot is more of a tool for publicity than for development.

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

#68

Post by gradys »

dylan604 wrote: post #62
google234123 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone is not perfectly OK with training language models on copyrighted text. It's just that evilCorps do it anyways, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. I can't do anything. At best, I could get a Twitter account and complain to the ether. The copyright holders can't do anything against the might evilCorps, but that doesn't make them okay with it. The fact you believe this is just sad, and exactly what…

Could you explain why you think training models on copyrighted text is illegal or copyright infringement or whatever else it might be?

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

#69

Post by zekrioca »

IvyMike wrote: post #64
zekrioca wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attention to "in the last year or so". The same link was posted 13-14h ago, not "1 year or so ago".

They have explicitly stated that are ok with retrying recent overlooked stories just in case a story got missed or buried for whatever reason. They are also ok with reposting year+ old stories that did get significant attention at the time, since the new respost may find a new audience.

The main point is: Assuming the New section is a queue, and that the very same link is posted twice, should the first link be re-queued in the New section again? It was clearly a duplicate, although it was not flagged as such.

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

#70

Post by c7DJTLrn »

lamontcg wrote: post #65

Given how the racist twitterbot AI turned out, along with L4 autonomous driving by 2017, I suspect that Copilot is going to suffer most from an incredibly high velocity of churned out security bugs and bad code. SWEs are probably going to get fired for using it and companies will need to ban it, even if the legal problems don't take it down.

It's useless. It is a problem looking for a solution much like most "AI" tools these days. I am frankly frustrated at everyone buying into this stunt.
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