61–70 of 127 posts
I’m curious if enterprise customers would have license concerns about the code produced from using this. Have any big companies set policies on employees using these kind of tools? Do they allow them?
Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).
You make it sound like Copilot is just copy-pasting something from a single repo. The code Copilot generates for me is extremely specific to my application. It understands the context, my code style and what I'm trying to do. The result looks like my own code and is utilizing the already existing parts of my application. The code it writes for me solves problems that you cannot find a standard solution for anywhere a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where's the part of the Copilot EULA that indemifies users against copyright infringement for the generated code? If the model was trained entirely using code that Microsoft has copyright over (for example: the MS Windows codebase, the MS Office codebase, etc.) then they could offer legal assurances that they have usage rights to the generated code as derivative works. Without such assurances, how do you know that th…
>Are you comfortable risking your company's IP by unknowingly using AGPLv3-licensed code that Copilot "generated" in your company's products? This would not risk your company's IP.
"The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there."
So your company is okay providing all their source code to users?
I know that some companies do this, but most do not.
Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).
It's an unpopular opinion which is why I'll cowardly write it under a throwaway account. Josh, I have a ton of respect for your work just btw. I can't help but see a headline like this and think "Okay the license argument has to be the top comment already". To me this whole thing is like pandora's box and it will not in any way be put back into the box. In the long run isn't arguing about the code it generates and ho…
What? I don't see any utility outside of education and even there it's pretty sketchy.
For business, legal compliance is not a joke and instantly shuts it down. The only businesses willing to use ChatGPT for generating code would be naive young startups who don't realize some assembly is still required and the instructions are missing no matter how much they query the bot. That's called expertise (which they don't yet have). It's not good enough to just write the code. Someone has to comprehend it so they can tweak it as needed. At some point the tweaks will become unwieldy and require actual software engineering that the bot doesn't know how to do (transform from one design pattern to another and know which to use). More power to them if they can cobble something together and then succeed at maintaining it. By the time they're through they'll have pulled off so many miracles that they won't need the bot anymore and become experts. That's quite the trial by fire, but hey everyone has to find their way!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an unpopular opinion which is why I'll cowardly write it under a throwaway account. Josh, I have a ton of respect for your work just btw. I can't help but see a headline like this and think "Okay the license argument has to be the top comment already". To me this whole thing is like pandora's box and it will not in any way be put back into the box. In the long run isn't arguing about the code it generates and ho…
Agreed. Copyright is not a fundamental law of physics, its something we invented to help incentivize creation. The moment AI tools show to help spur creation, they are now more useful than copyright so society will simply rewrite the laws to adapt.
Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).
It's an unpopular opinion which is why I'll cowardly write it under a throwaway account. Josh, I have a ton of respect for your work just btw. I can't help but see a headline like this and think "Okay the license argument has to be the top comment already". To me this whole thing is like pandora's box and it will not in any way be put back into the box. In the long run isn't arguing about the code it generates and ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Are you comfortable risking your company's IP by unknowingly using AGPLv3-licensed code that Copilot "generated" in your company's products? This would not risk your company's IP.
>> This would not risk your company's IP. "The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there." So your company is okay providing all their sour…
Nothing is forcing them to do that. If they are infringing they simply need to delete the infringing code and rewrite it by hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you’re going to need to ship that emacs extension if you want to keep advertising on HN :-)
haha we'll have it out polished in the next week or so :P
Sadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).
Where's the part of the Copilot EULA that indemifies users against copyright infringement for the generated code? If the model was trained entirely using code that Microsoft has copyright over (for example: the MS Windows codebase, the MS Office codebase, etc.) then they could offer legal assurances that they have usage rights to the generated code as derivative works. Without such assurances, how do you know that th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. Told to steer clear of this (in fairness, not only CoPilot, also ChatGPT and stuff), until somebody else pipeclean this in the courts. No matter what is said, there are no license guarantees on the generated code, as you don’t know the exact provenance, so it seems only sensible to be on the safe side.
The lawyers on my last job were terrified to know that we store tracking information on website visitors computers that is used to track them by third party corporations.