GitHub Copilot for Business is now available

Post by LelouBil » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 12:09 AM UTC

fire wrote: post #73

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 attributi…

Post by LelouBil » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 12:12 AM UTC

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #77

What's the benefit of using copilot over a package manager? Both help you reuse code that's already been written, but using packages gives you updates, explicit dependency tracking, documentation, etc.

Post by fortyseven » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 12:14 AM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #30

wg0 wrote: post #26

There was Kite also that was shutdown. Microsoft can maybe keep it as a vanity product but seriously - I'm curious what kind of teams pr developers are using CoPilot and how much more productive you feel?

I love it. I love that it learns my codebase, my style, etc... and truly does feel like a second brain at times. I am using it within JS/Vue and Python and really enjoy it a lot. You can write a simple comment like "upsert the object in the store, and if the item is incomplete recursively call a refresh fn until it is complete" and it will "magically" do the rest - down to understanding where the objects I am referri…

Post by fire » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 12:18 AM UTC

WithinReason wrote: post #52

Spooky23 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make a conversation awkward, ask your account team about the indemnification for the AI’s potential copyright violations.

"Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 month…

  Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 months preceding the claim.  
  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.

  • i) means you can't modify copilot suggestions without losing this protection,
  • ii) isn't actually defined; this might mean they can use it as a crutch to avoid providing protection,
  • iii) means you aren't protected if you fail to enable settings that are not on by default but in theory allow you to avoid generations that reference "radioactive" licenses like gpl.

Post by belorn » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 12:27 AM UTC

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.