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GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

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Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#71

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

Gigachad wrote: post #51
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #38

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…

Ultimately I think MS is right betting on the fact that this will not matter in the long run. All AI tools are trained on copyrighted data. The tools are too useful to cripple with restrictive laws written for a previous era.

>> All AI tools are trained on copyrighted data. The tools are too useful to cripple with restrictive laws written for a previous era.

Are you sure that Disney and Games Workshop will not mind if make your own Mickey Mouse / Warhammer 40K cross-over movie for profit? (I would watch it!)

AI can help generate it, so it must be okay.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#72

Post by hathawsh »

aunch wrote: post #7

if you want an actual enterprise solution with in-customer-tenant/on-prem hosting, check out Codeium ( https://www.codeium.com/enterprise ) disclaimer: i'm from the Codeium team. but really, we will even ship you a physical box if that level of data security is important to you

I looked around your web site and I thought about trying out your product, but one feeling never stopped nagging me: even though I'm not in a large organization, I need absolute assurance that the AI is trained only on our code and permissively licensed open source software (like MIT or BSD.) Also, whenever it uses permissively licensed code, I need a complete list of everything it based its work upon so I can declare the relevant licenses.

Without that, I can't even entertain the idea of using an AI code tool for anything but private projects that I don't share with anyone.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#73

Post by fire »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #5

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).

I don't understand why they aren't tagging data with license information and allowing users to use models that don't include certain licenses - seems like it would be the middle ground given the stance they've taken; like, "we don't think it's a problem, but if this makes you feel better you can use these other models that specifically don't train on gpl code, or whatever"

I would prefer to see full license attributions included in generated responses, though. Something that then also wouldn't be that difficult to generate a licenses file from?

Amazon's CodeWhisperer has a "reference tracker" that tells you the license of training data code if the generated response is within some similarity threshold, but that's still not good enough imo.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#74

Post by Maxious »

rwalle wrote: post #24

So the code suggestion comes from the same data trained for the public version, which could include GPL code or have other issues? I doubt any company would use this in their production code. Internal tools, maybe.

This version specifically removes snippets that appear in open source code.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#75

Post by hobs »

Maxious wrote: post #69
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #38

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…

Copilot for Business includes an $500k indemnity if you turn on excluding suggestions that match open source code https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

I wonder if the procurement departments get to negotiate that higher for the bigger contracts, because that's low imo.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#76

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

charcircuit wrote: post #67
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

>So your company is okay providing all their source code to users? Nothing is forcing them to do that. If they are infringing they simply need to delete the infringing code and rewrite it by hand.

>> Nothing is forcing them to do that.

If you use AGPLv3-licensed code in your codebase, you are agreeing to the terms of the license.

Practically all corporate legal teams for companies that creates software will strictly prohibit the use of AGPLv3-licensed software, if not all GPL-based licenses.

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#79

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

Maxious wrote: post #69
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #38

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…

Copilot for Business includes an $500k indemnity if you turn on excluding suggestions that match open source code https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

Good to know, but there are caveats:

"GitHub’s defense obligations do not apply if (i) the claim is based on Code that differs from a Suggestion provided by GitHub Copilot, (ii) you fail to follow reasonable software development review practices designed to prevent the intentional or inadvertent use of Code in a way that may violate the intellectual property or other rights of a third party, or (iii) you have not enabled all filtering features available in GitHub Copilot."

Do they define what constitutes "reasonable software development review practices designed to prevent the intentional or inadvertent use of Code in a way that may violate the intellectual property or other rights of a third party" ?

Re: GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

#80

Post by IceHegel »

Gigachad wrote: post #51
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #38

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…

Ultimately I think MS is right betting on the fact that this will not matter in the long run. All AI tools are trained on copyrighted data. The tools are too useful to cripple with restrictive laws written for a previous era.

I agree. AI is happening. Don’t swim upstream.
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