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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#701

Post by matheusmoreira »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #584
sirsinsalot wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A commons of knowledge is a public good." Yes but this copilot model takes that, adds value and doesn't itself join the public common good. Instead it takes it, and makes you pay to have it back in another form. If copilot were open source and the model released for the public good, being built of public data (in your scenario) we would have a very different conversation.

Yes they haven't paid it forward, or back, but why fight on the occupier's territory. By calling for legal frameworks to enforce this we accept the language and terms of the dominant party. By using courts and the law and creating new law for copyright we actually move further from the goal of abolishing copyright and IP entirely. Every time we use courts to enforce IP we're strengthening the Walt Disneys and Nintend…

> the goal of abolishing copyright and IP entirely

Completely agree with you. It's the 21st century, once data has been published there is no controlling it anymore and all attempts to do so lead to the destruction of computer freedom. No doubt people all over the world copy code every single day with nobody even finding out about it. I'd rather get rid of all these monopolists than limit the potential of computers to whatever reality enables them.

>I accept I am in a group of like 3 people with this goal but it's my view

Now we're four.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#702

Post by [deleted] »

nickjj wrote: post #535

This might be overreacting but is there a way to opt-out of Copilot using your code in open source repos? It feels morally wrong to me that I can spend thousands of hours working on projects on my own free will but then a company can sell the code I wrote to others in the form of snippet completion as a service. In fact they end up selling your code back to yourself if you plan to use the service. If the answer is no…

[deleted]

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#703

Post by LordDragonfang »

futureshock wrote: post #674
Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #569

I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. Copyright and licensing are bad, actually. Stop getting worked up about the idea of using courts to punish theft. Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characte…

In this thread: many engineers nervously sweating. The moats are drying up and the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle. This tech is the first product in a long line of products that will massively lower the barrier to entry. It has been a good run, but it was never going to last forever. We are not part of the capitalist class and were never going to be.

Copilot replaces code monkeys, not engineers. Ultimately it's just faster stack overflow, proper software engineers and system architects are going to be just as in demand as they are right now for the foreseeable future. At the point at which that stops being the case, we'll have much bigger societal and existential problems (because it implies the singularity is nigh)

(You're correct on not being part of the capitalist class, though)

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#704

Post by thewoolleyman »

Artificial Intelligence is causing us to revisit the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre).

It is putting a new spin on some traditional Open Source Lessons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#L...).

People share and reuse snippets of unattributed snippets of MIT-licensed and GPL-licensed code on the internet all the time, StackOverflow, etc.

StackOverflow is profiting from that activity indirectly by facilitating it. They profit passively through ad revenue, and actively through the Teams subscription offering.

But nobody seem too upset about that.

How is an AI which facilitates the same code sharing fundamentally any different? Because it’s scraping it itself, rather than humans contributing it?

Seems like a tenuous argument at best.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#705

Post by kragen »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #657
sammax wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t most licenses require at least attribution? I don’t believe GitHub is restricting themselves to only licenses that don’t. In fact the only software licenses I can think of that don’t require attribution are 0BSD, WTFPL, CC0, MIT-0 and Unlicense, and they all aren’t super popular. Also in some countries creators have inalienable moral rights which can be enforced regardless of the license. For example in Germany…

This feels like a tool that can easily be destroyed by a lawsuit, I can't imagine a TOS can force you to give away your copy rights (especially if they allow and encourage you to post your own copyright).

If it can't then Wikipedia is doomed; its entire licensing status rests on the notion that editors grant such a license as part of their clickwrap ToS.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#706

Post by ThalesX »

futureshock wrote: post #674
Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #569

I find this whole topic very annoying, this is like the 3rd variation to reach the front page today. But it has made me realize why I instinctively dislike Free Software as a movement. Copyright and licensing are bad, actually. Stop getting worked up about the idea of using courts to punish theft. Stop getting into a frenzy of arousal about the police kicking down doors to drag Billy Gates to jail because 80 characte…

In this thread: many engineers nervously sweating. The moats are drying up and the wizards are about to be thrown out of the castle. This tech is the first product in a long line of products that will massively lower the barrier to entry. It has been a good run, but it was never going to last forever. We are not part of the capitalist class and were never going to be.

The world might change, but software engineers have been working with and within change their entire careers presumably. I think we'll be OK, as people, no matter what happens.

I was sweating nervously before I started using Copilot awhile ago but I've stopped since because A - it really doesn't replace me, tried really hard; B - I don't sweat nervously for IntelliSense either.

There's also C, where being of an entrepreneurial mindset, I'd love the opportunity to hand over the software to an AI dev and just direct the implementation to my desire until I have a working product. I bet I could secure a higher room in the castle if instead of coding for 8 hours per day I could work on n products with capable AI Software Engineers. We're not there yet though.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#707

Post by WisNorCan »

celeritascelery wrote: post #686
ellyagg wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because making code as freely shareable and remixable as possible is a huge boon for humanity.

Code being freely shareable and remixable is great. Selling that open source code for profit is not.

Is your take that Microsoft should offer this for free? Or if they are not willing to do it for free, Microsoft should cancel this service and we should wait for Apache or someone else to offer the service?

Or something else ?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#708

Post by earnesti »

celeritascelery wrote: post #686
ellyagg wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because making code as freely shareable and remixable as possible is a huge boon for humanity.

Code being freely shareable and remixable is great. Selling that open source code for profit is not.

What is wrong with someone making a little dough. It is just numbers in database.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#709

Post by gfrff »

WisNorCan wrote: post #707
celeritascelery wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code being freely shareable and remixable is great. Selling that open source code for profit is not.

Is your take that Microsoft should offer this for free? Or if they are not willing to do it for free, Microsoft should cancel this service and we should wait for Apache or someone else to offer the service? Or something else ?

Microsoft should make this service free for open source (not just thought leaders), and compensate people otherwise. I should have a 0.01% equity in Open AI if they're using my stuff like this.

Or they should do opt in.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#710

Post by tuckerman »

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #644
tuckerman wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if this view is software specific or relates to any work released online? For example, do you feel similarly about a novelist or graphic artist? I reckon at least a few software engineers look at what they produce not entirely differently from how an artist or writer looks at theirs.

It's a good, and thought-provoking, question. First to be flippant the idea of a software developer with that view sounds so unbearably insufferable and full of themselves I hope never to meet one. All code is terrible, be less attached. Stream of consciousness: Should artists or writers be paid for what they produce? Yes. So why not software developers? I'm paid for what I produce. But then I don't release the stuff…

The reason I ask with writers in particular is because, like code, having access to it necessarily means that the viewer has the ability to copy it as much as they'd like. Unlike software, however, there is no ability to keep the source code private in a book while still having users.

I definitely agree that copyright protections have become far too strong but I don't think we can really ever know if we would have be able to build the strong open source community we have today without coopting the copyright system for copyleft protections. At the same time, perhaps we are past the point where it's necessary and now it's holding us back... it's entirely possible!

To the first thought, I personally see some coding as a creative act (some is doing _a lot_ of work there though). It's not because I fancy myself a Picasso but because I think some (again, doing a lot of work!) solutions/ideas have a bit of their creator in them and, for those works, the author should be able to exert some control over their works. I think this is more philosophical than legal/political, but I would disagree that its flippant :)

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