FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
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Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#2I am excited to see where these questions lead.
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#3Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org?
The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc).
Here's an opportunity to really advance in an interesting area with ML -> something that may open up programming to more people -> may advance computers ability to program and modify their own programs in the long run.
And regardless of the FSF attorney stuff, places like china, tiny little LLC's with no assets will very likely use the wonderful amount of code on the web to develop solutions in this space, even if FSF claims everything is a violation. Where is the vision anymore from FSF.
One thing that's been sad about the FSF -> it's gone from what I would consider a forward looking idealism sort of thing -> here's how we could do / make cool stuff that let communities work together -> to now sort of a legal compliance type org that really is focused on "actionable claims" " protected against violations" etc.
Question - does the Linux community and other successful larger open source communities welcome the FSF and their attorney's into the discussion? I can hardly imagine the BSD's, the Linux folks really connecting anymore with them.
Is there space for a different group, maybe a collection of actual develops shipping code in larger communities to get together, no FSF / SFC lawyers present, to think creatively about the future? What should we be working for, what is fair to everyone, what helps society, what works around pro-social community building?
A tool that helps with cross language building blocks for common functions etc (stackoverflow on steroids) - just how bad is this?
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#4> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust [...]. Activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work.
> We will read the submitted white papers, and we will publish ones that we think help elucidate the problem.
Doesn't give me hope they're aiming for unbiased opinion. I would be very surprised if any of the published papers don't closely align with FSFs apriori position.
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#5I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#6An interesting initiative from FSF, through I suspect the answer the most of the question will be answered when someone attempts a similar projects in a more traditional copyright-restrictive area.
As an example I would like to see is a Cosinger, where the AI is trained using songs on youtube and streaming services. With the final product, a user start to sing and the algorithm attempt to sing along and give the singer suggestions for how the song should continue. I could see how a lot of musicians would be willing to pay good money for such program, and removing obligations to pay any money for the training set would make it much more feasible to create.
There are already AI's that create music (through unlikely from proprietary training sets). A Cosinger shouldn't be too far from that.
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#7The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation because it's unfair and illegal what they're doing.
This isn't ML, it is a ripoff and is violating clear software licensing terms. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
Software freedom matters, but I wouldn't expect the typical HN type to understand, since their money is made on exploiting freely-available software, putting it into proprietary little SaaS boxes, then re-selling it.
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#8Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a very lawyer driven type org? The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). Here's an o…
No. The FSF had lawyers from the beginning and always thought (I talked with RMS in the early 80's some) that enforcement was part of the plan.
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#9I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.
This was the same mentality that brought copyleft to the masses in 1984. While you may not care, there are others who do care about the sanctity of license agreements. This is an argument where staying silent means you accept this approach. Of the millions of open source projects, a large portion of the contributors ARE speaking up because they don't find this to be acceptable. I personally think copilot is the future and all this discussion is doing is going to bring a license usage feature to copilot (e.g. i want only or i do not want GPL code in my copilot suggestions)
Please continue using GitHub as you were, but maybe consider acting on your words and either removing or changing licenses within your code that does not represent your ideals. Nothing is preventing you from releasing code into the public domain, so do that!
Re: FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
#10I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.
Well then you're a BSD-license kind of person.
Not everybody is and that's ok too.