61–70 of 838 posts
One might argue copilot puts into software an algorithm that humans are already doing. Software like that is usually inevitable.
Still, it sucks there's no benefit for the contributors.
The most ethical thing I can think of is some kinda 'Spotify-like' revenue sharing model, based on how often their code is used by others. Not that they'd ever implement that if they can get away with it!
Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.
I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.
If I use grammarly, are they responsible for what am I aiming to write?
Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
The problem may not be boring. Typing boilerplate code is. I work on games as hobby. Sometimes I implement mechanics requiring vector math. Working on mechanics is interesting. Writing down math is not. Copilot helps with later.
GitHub provides the repo hosting and tools for free on public projects. I'm happy with this deal.
If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?
Basically, the project was to package Cordova + Backbone + Marionette, plus a couple of tools, under their own commercial name. Then they'd go around potential clients presenting it as the perfect solution to build hybrid applications for web/mobile/smartTV/whatever.
A certain Monday, the "architect" arrived boasting. He did that often, but this time he was more boastful. He explained that he had spent the whole weekend coding. He had written an incredible tool that would create a skeleton for a project from zero. You would type something like `tool create` and it would create the whole project with all the scripts and some example views and whatnot.
It was Yeoman's yo CLI tool, of course. He had just changed the copyright in the comments, removed most of the comments, he had deleted any mention to yeoman or the original creators, changed the name of the executable script and that's it.
The whole thing was OS code picked up from various repos and packaged as their own. The company used it to sell development projects. The so-called-architect used it to sell himself inside the company and then jump away into a startup as CTO.
Is this common or is it just anecdata? I don't know. It's clearly not the only time I've seen something like this and I do know that in certain companies around here it isn't exactly uncommon. But I can't say how common or uncommon it is.
Would I call this "selling other people's code"? Yes, I would.
I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
The first can be automated without ML though. And once you use ML you cannot guarantee it won't copy-paste existing code. This whole thing would be fine if GitHub hadn't just used all public code on their platform, ignoring all involved licenses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's absolutely fine to allow humans to do that while prohibiting (commercialized) AI to do the same thing.
I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?
We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained.
I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an average human at these things, and thus we can't just blindly assume it is conceptualising rather than copying. Copilot regularly produces verbatim copies of existing code when working on non-trivial things.
Forget about the "AI" label: Copilot is just a complex computer program, that takes code from other people and inserts various permutations of it into your editor, whilst ignoring the license of that code.
I get the feeling this entire debate would have been non-existent had this been a Jetbrains product instead. The whole thing is just bizarre when the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly without once looking at whatever license is attached.
I am not a lawyer, but my legal intuition / common sense says that “code snippets” are not copyrightable. There’s some sliding scale on when a code snippet would become so non-trivial that a reasonable (!) judge would consider it copyrightable, but nothing Copilot does is anywhere close to that limit, IMO.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So when you google a problem and it leads you to a code snippet that solves it that just happens to be OSS, you immediately scrub your brain and pretend you never saw it and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?
Google usage is outright forbidden for work in institutions that care about intellectual property rights, so the brain scrub issue is just arguing at the wrong level. If you're googling solutions around you're already not taking intellectual property seriously enough to care about what happens after you lift ideas around.