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GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

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Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#91

Post by greatgib »

ghoward wrote: post #66
greatgib wrote: post #60

I'm a big proponent of open source and I'm usually not nice with bad moves of GitHub. For example, i find stupid to use vscode and believe that it is open source when it is a lie. But, in that case, I think that the things that are put to charge GitHub are not right. I think that the idea is nice and it is fair from open source code. Anyone is free of downloading free software and doing something similar, and it is n…

Unfortunately, just because code is open source doesn't mean that there aren't terms of use attached with it. One of the simplest and most widely used terms is attribution. This means that if Copilot does not attribute code when it copies and modifies it, then it is violating most open source licenses. Full stop.

My point is that somehow, it is not copilot that is violating the licenses, but the code that is generated is.

So, if you just use copilot to generate random things, you are ok. But if you try to use the generated code for anything: distribution, selling, eventually usage. Then, you are violating the licenses in the same way as you took yourself the parts of code to reuse.

It is possible users of copilot that should avoid that or be very careful to check any line produced (that is almost impossible).

Also, by itself, copying one or two lines of code can hardly be limited by copyright. But, as we so, copilot can spit big full block of code from existing projects.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#92

Post by superkuh »

If you're hosting at the free github service, or even paid, github did not scrape your code. They just accessed the information on the hardware they owned. HTTP wouldn't have to be involved at all. They could just look at the disks.

Additionally, "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy.""

The above isn't to say I agree with this but just to highlight the dangers of outsourcing and the cloud.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#93

Post by blibble »

superkuh wrote: post #92

If you're hosting at the free github service, or even paid, github did not scrape your code. They just accessed the information on the hardware they owned. HTTP wouldn't have to be involved at all. They could just look at the disks. Additionally, "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet…

believe it or not there's more countries in the world than the United States

> "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy."

this is definitely not the case for 100% of the rest of the world

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#94

Post by smoldesu »

superkuh wrote: post #92

If you're hosting at the free github service, or even paid, github did not scrape your code. They just accessed the information on the hardware they owned. HTTP wouldn't have to be involved at all. They could just look at the disks. Additionally, "The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet…

The good news is that Github then also has no reasonable expectation for me to use their service. Most developers can just as easily set up a Gitlab or self-hosted alternative with zero friction.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#96

Post by richardfey »

seph-reed wrote: post #13
iliekcomputers wrote: post #3

If you open-sourced code and allowed it to be used for commercial purposes, I don't see the point of being pissy about Github using it, I'm saying this as someone who's written quite a lot of MIT code. (And charging for a product which adds value to your developer experience and needs money to be run is not a bad thing)

Frankly, I think the reason people are upset is because a tool that once revolved around sharing work with others has been bought by a super giant corporation and then all of that sharing is being turned into a means of putting the people who shared out of work. Or in the very least, cutting their salaries dramatically.

How do you see this technology putting people out of work or having their salaries cut dramatically? I do not write any code that could be found and copy/pasted from somewhere online.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#97

Post by ghoward »

greatgib wrote: post #91
ghoward wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, just because code is open source doesn't mean that there aren't terms of use attached with it. One of the simplest and most widely used terms is attribution. This means that if Copilot does not attribute code when it copies and modifies it, then it is violating most open source licenses. Full stop.

My point is that somehow, it is not copilot that is violating the licenses, but the code that is generated is. So, if you just use copilot to generate random things, you are ok. But if you try to use the generated code for anything: distribution, selling, eventually usage. Then, you are violating the licenses in the same way as you took yourself the parts of code to reuse. It is possible users of copilot that should…

You have good points, but I would argue that Copilot itself is the entity distributing copyrighted code since there are times when it copies code verbatim. That puts the legal onus on Copilot itself.

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#98

Post by sfg »

Is there no licence with any sort of model training clause: "If this licence or the source code it covers is used to train a statistical model, then the model and code used to create the model are covered by this licence (which has terms like the AGPL)"?

If not, will anybody quietly slip something like this into Copilot's training data?

Re: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you

#99

Post by ghoward »

haolez wrote: post #95

Source Hut[0] is getting more attractive with each passing day, but I'm not sure I can adapt to it's weird e-mail centric pull requests (and I know that this is a standard Git feature, but the UX seems bad). [0] https://sourcehut.org/

The other thing is that Source Hut is immensely complicated to set up. I wish I could love it, but Gitea was just so much easier to get going.
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