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I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rubyist5eva 5y agoYour mom
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gfodor 5y agoThis is a hell of a Pandora’s box that’s being cracked open here. Interesting times ahead. For example, if you believe these kinds of tools will become a huge competitive advantage, and that the inclusion of GPL code is a meaningful force multiplier, it kind of implies the fusion of AI code generation and the GPL will eat the world.
- saurik 5y agoOnly if people understand that the result is under GPL; if they don't, then this is a mechanism to slowly "launder" the work people put into GPL code to funnel into non-GPL codebases.
- xbar 5y agoWhy is human understanding going to prevent this? Doesn't it seem like this is precisely the de facto function of Copilot: a license laundering machine?
- saurik 5y agoIf humans understand this then presumably lawyers would start hunting for code replication caused by Copilot--using automated mechanisms similar to those used by professors at Universities to catch people cheating--and do the moral equivalent of ambulance chasing: offering to file all the paperwork on spec for a cut of an assured payout. But if people in general believe this to be fair use somehow, then GPL is essentially dead (I have been a big advocate for it over the years, and if people are doing this--and everyone thinks it is OK--then it loses the entire point as far as I am concerned).
- gfodor 5y agoIt depends on which "people" you're referring to. I suspect the degree to which the programmer knows this is of little relevance to the question of how the legal + risk management implications will play out.
- saurik 5y agoI mean general people people, not only developers: people includes managers and lawyers and politicians and everyone who might cause you to have GPL Copilot separate from MIT Copilot... the same people who right now cause licenses to matter, despite many developers not understanding anything about copyright law and just thinking "I'll steal that other developer's work as it makes my life easier". If anything, I think the real test of this tech is going to be audio, as it has the right overlap of "big copyright is going to get pissed", "there already exist tools that attempt to automatically detect even small bits of infringement", "people actually litigate even small bits of infringement", and "it feels feasible in the near future": you whistle a tune, and the result is a fully produced backing track that sometimes happens to exactly sound like the band backing Taylor Swift on a recognizable song and generates Taylor Swift's voice, almost verbatim, singing some of her lyrics to go along with it.
- orlovs 5y agoLets face, gitlab and github valuation is based on future “ai” code autogens. Brave new world
- yawaworht1978 5y agoI cannot see them even throwing together a library. For example, how could they architect, let's say something like jQuery?
- voidnullnil 5y agoComing up with this "return $this" pattern to emulate a composition operator seems like a very AI thing to do.
- yonixw 5y agoBased on their website, Gitlab are pushing the CI\CD future not AI.
- canadianfella 5y agoThe British way of using “are” on a non-plural word is weird to me and always looks very awkward.
- enraged_camel 5y agoIt's kind of interesting how quickly sentiment turned negative. The original feature showcase/announcement post was full of excitement by HN (which is kind of strange, if you think about how skeptical the HN crowd is towards AI/ML and automation of programming) but it hasn't been a week and people are already talking about the questionable ethics and potentially disastrous consequences of using the feature.
- tyingq 5y agoDo you mean this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266 There's plenty of skepticism there, even in the early comments.
- arp242 5y agoI can't speak for anyone else, but when I first saw it, it seemed kind of okay, but I also didn't really look too deeply in to it. As I've looked at it a bit more closely and thought about it for a few days, my original feelings have soured quite a bit. I never considered the copyright and related ethical implications of ML at all, or thought about the impact it may or may not have on programmers. Your first thoughts on something can be wrong (and actually, often are) and it takes a bit to really think things though – or at least, it does for me.
- M4v3R 5y agoWhile I understand the sentiment wasn’t Copilot trained on code not only hosted on GitHub, but found all over the Internet? Which means hosting your code yourself would not prevent GitHub from using it to train Copilot. That raises an interesting question though - how do you opt out? Is there even a way to do it?
- bryanrasmussen 5y agorobots.txt, or a copyright notice saying the code can't be used to train AI which bots will ignore and open their corporate masters to liability. on edit: fixed typo
- woodruffw 5y agoThis kind of learning needs to be opt-in, not opt-out. I would also be extremely surprised if most open source copyright holders didn't already expect their licensing terms to protect against this kind of code/authorship laundering. Speaking individually, I know that it certainly surprised me to hear that GitHub thinks that it's probably okay to regurgitate entire fragments of the training set without preserving the license.
- ezoe 5y agoBad news for you. Japanese copyright law, article 47-7 explicitly allow using copyrightable works for data analysis by means of a computer(including recording a derivative work created by adaptation) It should be considered as fair-use of USA except we don't use Common Law system so we explicitly state what exempt from the copyright protection.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoThanks for the bad news! Not glad to hear it but glad to know something I didn't. That said - so they would be able to sell some things in Japan that they couldn't other places.
- amelius 5y ago
- throwaway3699 5y agoAre people angry at copyright violations, or Microsoft? Copyright and patents have their place, but they've clearly overreached long ago.
- EugeneOZ 5y agoSome unknown person is trying to get some hype on “cancel github” cry. I don't give a shit about the Copilot, but I care even less about Rian Hunter and his statements.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoMy thoughts too
- Nicksil 5y agoAlso >Who asked? But you deleted that comment.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lloydatkinson 5y agoWho asked?
- Nicksil 5y ago>Who asked? Now this was completely unexpected.
- Nicksil 5y ago>Some unknown person is trying to get some hype on “cancel github” cry. >I don't give a shit about the Copilot, but I care even less about Rian Hunter and his statements. This is untrue because you had a choice of not saying anything at all and carrying on (clearly not giving a shit) or take the time to leave such a comment (giving enough of a shit to inform everyone you don't give a shit.) So far this and Lloyd's is the only crying going on in this topic.
- EugeneOZ 5y agoThis is true. And I didn't even read your nickname because I don't give a shit about a shmuck who is trying to tell me what I care about :)
- gbtw 5y agoDoes github guarantee that my private repo's content are not being leaked this way in the future?
- hashhar 5y agoWhy is this noteworthy? Who is this person? Am I missing something? I agree that there needs to be talk about licensing and copyright but with so "less/no content" there can be no meaningful discussion other than aimless banter.
- judge2020 5y agoThey're not particularly popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thelig.ht https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thelig.ht (except for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18133450 ) And their only huge project on GitHub is dbxfs, a userspace dropbox filesystem with 687 stars https://github.com/rianhunter?tab=repositories&q=&type=&language=&sort=stargazers https://github.com/rianhunter?tab=repositories&q=&type=&lang... I think this is just a post meant to continue the discussion of CoPilot past the first 2 days of news.
- pmarreck 5y agoI'm glad the post showed up because I've been in the hospital for 3 days and I was like HOLY SHIT WHAT IS THIS? ;)
- eitland 5y ago> Who is this person? One of the beautiful things about HN is that you don't need to be anything, you just have to have something interesting to say.
- meibo 5y agoThis isn't interesting though. It doesn't even provide any value. It's a random guy that doesn't like GitHub, it could have just as well been a HN comment from yesterday. It's just posted(not by the guy that made the page, mind you) to farm karma, exploit the news cycle and carve out some more space for discussion of this tired topic.
- eitland 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- henvic 5y agoI really hope this weakens copyright. We can live without it.
- lc9er 5y agoWho can? Sure, Disney shouldn’t be able to copyright public domain works or Mickey Mouse until the end of time. But they also shouldn’t be able to swoop in, use your songs/artwork/software in their latest movie, without permission or appropriate compensation.
- mmastrac 5y agoHobbling copyright would likely make Disney et al much weaker in the future, to where this might not be as big of a deal.
- dvdkon 5y agoWell, right now it could also just weaken copyleft while leaving proprietary non-public code copyright holders well-off.
- eddieh 5y agoAre you kidding? If I produce any creative work, don't copy it without my permission, full stop. © 2021
- matthewmacleod 5y agoDon’t be too eager! Weakened copyright doesn’t necessarily translate to an overall benefit, at least for software. Weakening copyright also weakens copyleft - for example, it seems reasonable to me that the producer of an open-source work should be entitled to require reciprocal openness from people who build upon it. If I can legitimately launder some GPL source code (say, a Linux kernel driver) through an ML model without being obliged to release the resulting code, I think everyone loses.
- blibble 5y ago> I think everyone loses. only people who have released their code publicly under a (mostly) open license so, not Microsoft
- amelius 5y agoCan't you just put a robots.txt file in your project which says "no ML".
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoLots of people arguing this guy isn't anybody, but the name seemed sort of familiar to me and my quick googling and looking at his site makes me think he probably has done something that some people use? For example dbxfs seems to have quite a history. on edit: just saw there was a description of who he is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724247 as noted I don't know but not sure if it's enough to imply a bad motive of him wanting to get some sort of attention for opposing copilot. on second edit: huh, seems to be one of those occasions when I have mysteriously offended some people on HN without swearing, joking or being rude.
- wcerfgba 5y agoI'm glad that Copilot is bringing the grey areas of copyright into discussion. If I write a book and it is copyright, what's the smallest unit which is covered by that copyright? Each word is obviously not. Some sentences will be fairly generic and I will not be the first person to write them. But some sentences will be characteristic of the work or my own style. Clearly how we apply copyright to subdivisions of an original work is an open question.
- nomercy400 5y ago'Some sentences' makes me think of the link tax introduced to prevent aggregating news sources based on only headlines, so even generic sentences fall under copyright in certain cases.
- MontyCarloHall 5y agoThe legal term for this is scènes à faire[0], and there is quite a bit of legal precedent covering exactly the cases you bring up. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scènes_à_faire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scènes_à_faire
- canada_dry 5y ago> Limits of the scènes à faire doctrine are a matter of degree — that is, operate on a continuum. Copilot is certainly pushing that envelope.
- Engineering-MD 5y agoI think an interesting analogy is if you rewrote a book in your own words but with each paragraphs meaning intact. So you rewrote Harry Potter but with slightly different sentence structures, but meaning was otherwise near identical. It’s that copyright infringement? I think it would certainly be plagiarism. The other similar analogy is of translation: a translated work is still copied by ‘derived from’ copyright laws. Is this just what copilot is doing in some ways but for smaller components?
- breck 5y agoThis. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree. There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.
- IceDane 5y agook
- blihp 5y agoAnyone publishing anything on the Internet should expect this type of use case. If it is removed from github and republished via another site, there is absolutely nothing preventing another service/company from doing the exact same thing (or 'worse'... i.e. imagine a learning system that can actually understand the code) when scraping the alternative location. It's not unusual for bots to be among the most frequent visitors to low traffic pages these days and they aren't all just populating search engines.
- yashap 5y agoA bigger concern for many is that if you USE copilot, you’ll unintentionally copy code with licences that your company really, REALLY does not want to copy. For example, here’s copilot copying some very famous GPL code: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309?s=21 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309?s=2... And basically every software company avoids GPL like the plague, due to its strong copyleft conditions.
- blihp 5y agoSure, but that's a different end of the issue than I was referring to. I was pointing out that just taking code off of github wouldn't avoid the use case. Any published code from any public source is likely to eventually be used this way by someone.
- yashap 5y agoYeah, I agree with your point that “if you publish content to the internet, expect it to be used in ways you don’t intend, or even permit.” Just pointing out that a lot of the concerns are not “GitHub is stealing my code for use in Copilot,” but “using GitHub Copilot in my proprietary software is a massive risk/liability.”
- lacker 5y agoI thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585?s=20 https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright-for-literate-robots/ https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allows AI to be trained on copyrighted material, and humans who use this AI are not responsible for minor copyright infringement that happens accidentally as a result. However, this has not been tested in court in detail, so the consensus could change, and if you were extremely risk-averse you might want to avoid Copilot. A key quote from the second link: Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. Personally, I think law should allow Copilot. As a human, I am allowed to read copyrighted code and learn from it. An AI should be allowed to do the same thing. And nobody cares if my ten-line "how to invert a binary tree" snippet is the same as someone else's. Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet.
- mmastrac 5y ago> Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. This would be interesting to test with AI and pop music.
- encryptluks2 5y agoThis is a stupid argument that the Twitter author made. Saving music digitally is reading by robot, so recording music that wasn't digital into a digital format is fair use.
- extra88 5y ago> recording music that wasn't digital into a digital format is fair use If you’re doing it from an analog format you bought for your own use (format shifting), it is fair use.
- darnfish 5y agoPeople really sign up without reading Terms of Conditions and then complain when GitHub decides to do something with the data that you've given them permission to use under the ToS
- Engineering-MD 5y agoA tiny percentage (less than 1%) [0]of people read terms and conditions- they are long, repetitive and often in legal language. If you expect to read every terms and conditions and privacy policy (and every change there of), you would waste over 240 hours over the year.[1] [0] Bakos, Y., Marotta-Wurgler, F. and Trossen, D. R. (2014) ‘Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts’, The Journal of Legal Studies, 43(1), pp. 1–35. doi: 10.1086/674424. [1] McDonald, A. M. and Cranor, L. F. (2008) ‘The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies’, A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 4(3), pp. 543–568.
- calvinmorrison 5y agoI abandoned github when they put code that was not licensed (is: copyright retained) and reproduced it and saved it in their Arctic Vault without the authors consent (mine)
- Retr0id 5y agoHow is the Arctic Vault different from any other offsite backup? I suppose one issue is that you (presumably) can't request deletion from it (which may even be a GDPR violation). Edit: I looked up the relevant GDPR stuff, apparently there's an exemption for when "erasing your data would prejudice scientific or historical research, or archiving that is in the public interest.", which it arguably includes the Arctic Vault.
- dheera 5y agoGDPR only applies to EU users.
- Retr0id 5y agoArctic Vault includes code written by EU users, and there is similar legislation in non-EU jurisdictions, e.g. California's CCPA
- corty 5y agoThere is an exception paragraph for various kinds of archives in GDPR: https://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-89-safeguards-and-derogations-relating-to-processing-for-archiving-purposes-the-public-interest-scientific-or-hi-GDPR.htm https://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-89-safeguards-a...
- wcerfgba 5y agoWhat's wrong with the Arctic Code Vault [1]? Is the only problem that they didn't seek your consent? How is it different to deploying a new availability zone and having your public repos accessible on another server? Your code is preserved verbatim, and it's not possible for GitHub to provide their service without the right to make verbatim copies of your code, which presumably you agreed to as part of their ToS. [1] https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/ https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
- saurik 5y agoI never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.
- nxc18 5y agoIndeed, the Windows Research Kernel itself is on GitHub. Kind of amazing that Microsoft is hosting their own pirated OS kernel. https://github.com/cnsuhao/Windows-Research-Kernel-1 https://github.com/cnsuhao/Windows-Research-Kernel-1
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoGithub is just the begining, they will crawl any open source code, crawling npm, pypi, cpan, public gitlab... If your code is open source, they will get it. That's kinda the point of open source.
- stingraycharles 5y agoI’d argue that this new use case is very interesting to open source and how it relates to the various licenses, and not necessarily “the point of open source”. I can imagine people being OK with their code being used as-is, and/or being modified, but not used completely out of context to train some corporate AI to inject code into commercial code based.
- CameronNemo 5y agoAgreed. I am considering relicensing all of my permissively licensed code because of this. The fundamental assumptions I had when releasing that code under a permissive license have been violated.
- sneak 5y agoWhen you use a permissive license, it’s best you stop thinking of it as your code. You’ve set it free for everyone, and while you may retain copyright in some abstract sense, it really no longer belongs to you. That’s a good thing.
- hiyou102 5y agoIt seems weird to do this over a feature that is still in technical preview, we don't even know if this product will ever ship publicly. I'm guessing a public release is still years off given the number issues they need to work through before release. My understanding is that they are working on an attribution system to catch cases with common code. Beyond that this person seems to use the MIT licensed code which already can be used internally by a company to host a proprietary service without attribution. It would make more sense to be outraged if you were using AGPL or something.
- fshee 5y agoGrats. I abandoned a while ago as well. If anyone is looking for a rec for self-hosting: Gitea is cake. Sits nicely behind Caddy as all my other services do. Alternatives such as Gitlab I found wanted to 'own' too much of my system.
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- ralph84 5y agoIf you don't want people and/or AI to read your code, why would you post it anywhere? Just post binaries and call it freeware.
- bullen 5y agoHow does he expose the git stuff? Is that open source?
- fartcannon 5y agoWhat happens when Microsoft sues someone for including Microsoft's code in another project? Will it be fair use then?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoAll of my open-source stuff on GH is MIT. I don't care whether or not Copilot (or anyone else) uses it. I seriously doubt that Copilot scans my (very few) private repos. Even then, I don't think I do anything particularly noteworthy. But that is just me.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eCa 5y agoThe license you have chosen requires attribution. You may not care[1] but the other party still most likely will be in violation if Copilot reproduces a significant chunk of your code. [1] I also MIT license my public code on Github, and also wouldn’t care that much.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI don't care about attribution. The only reason I use MIT, is so some knucklehead doesn't try to sue me, because they cheezed up my code.
- hedora 5y agoI wonder if the license is still binding in the other direction though. Moving forward, by publishing the code on the Internet you know you’re training an AI to copy it. What if you published a subtle proof of concept that takes out nuclear plants, and then some knucklehead deployed it because Copilot suggested it?
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThis is an interesting thought. I could see certain...agencies doing something like seeding the tech scene with insecure hashing algorithms, and them becoming a part of the Canon, due to consumption by uncritical ML training algorithms. We get back to the old "data quality" conundrum. We need to have a way to rate the quality of our data, which then opens the door to corruption and gaming. The circle of life, I guess...
- emersonrsantos 5y agoCopilot assumes the code in the repo is right, so just start putting some wrong code there as an anti Copilot measure.
- Engineering-MD 5y agoHide the hay in a pile of rotten hay as it were.
- okareaman 5y agoOf all the hills to die on, this seems like an odd choice. Why not work with others to iron out the legal and technical issues with this new technology?
- qayxc 5y agoIt's a reflex with some people and that's OK. Not everyone has the patience and ability to discuss their objections in a public forum while their rights are being violated (in their view). Some people have a passion and a very strong belief in their ideals and I applaud them for following through with it, even if I don't necessarily share their opinion on the matter.
- jpswade 5y agoPretty sure copyright and IP laws don’t overrule innovation.
- anonytrary 5y agoInnovation can take place so long as the right people are getting their deserved royalties. In this case, anyone whose code was used in the training set should get a lifetime royalty.
- kuon 5y agoI've given thousands of hours to open source projects, I really think open source is a pillar of modern society. So you would think I am all for something like copilot, but no. At first I thought this was a great feature, because easier access to code, but after some reflection, I am also very skeptical. I am able to make my code open source, because I can make a living out of it, and I have a lot of open source code that I love to share for things like education or private stuff, but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. If you can suck all the code without even I noticing it, that's not fair. The other thing is code quality. I don't want to sound rude, but there are tons of bad code around. Not necessarily because the author is unskilled, but because the code might not need to be high quality (for example I wrote a script to sort my photos, it was very hastily written and specific to my usage, I used once and was done with it). Also, there are some bad/wrong pattern that are really popular. I am surprised you are able to DMCA a twitch stream because someone whistle india jones theme but in this case it is considered fair use.
- judge2020 5y ago> but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. No I do not. Even strictly proprietary code can be copied and used in a for-profit way without approval as long as it qualifies for fair use.
- okamiueru 5y ago"Something real" and "fair use" don't get along. I'm also not sure fair use trumps licensing, since one is a copyright issue, and the other is the terms of use. You don't get to copy a snippet of GPL code and get away by calling it fair use. At least, I hope it isn't the case.
- judge2020 5y ago> I'm also not sure fair use trumps licensing, since one is a copyright issue, and the other is the terms of use. Licenses and copyright are strictly related - the 'terms of use' in the form of a license simply is a grant for someone to reuse something in full granted they uphold their end of the bargain which might mean (for the GPL) relicensing code that touches said licensed code; but, if someone doesn't agree to the license or they don't uphold their end (such as by releasing their own code under the same license), the license states that the use is now invalid and they're not allowed to copy it in the permissive form provided unless the use passes the fair use doctrine. Now 'fair use' is actually a pretty high bar, and most especially for code - feel free to read 17 USC 107 [0] which lays out how this is determined. What's tough for code is that, in terms of for copying code or using a library, it usually doesn't qualify for the initial requirement "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright". Unless you're taking GPL code and writing up how bad it is, or how efficient is is, chances are the use doesn't fit into fair use. So while I think I was indeed a bit obtuse in saying that code could be used in a fair use way (since that's not what happens in these contexts) it's technically possible. 0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
- daenz 5y agoI think it's clear that Copilot pushes boundaries...technological and legal. It makes people uncomfortable and challenges a lot of assumptions that we have about the current world. But this is exactly what I expect from the next revolutionary change in computing.
- emerged 5y agoYeah we need to work through all the issues this exposes. It’s going to be complicate and messy but it’s been inevitable for a long time.
- xunn0026 5y agoBecause if it's somebody that has to push boundaries it's not the plebs it's trillion dollar companies.
- Barrin92 5y agoit doesn't at all challenge any assumption we have about the current world, unless you've been living with the assumption that you can't automate the process of producing code snippets. Copilot is no different than stackoverflow with the exception that your selection mechanism is done by an artifical neural net rather than a bunch of people with up and downvotes in front of their screen. The reason people are uncomfortable here isn't some vague PR speech notion about the future, it's that copilot appears to be quite literally ignoring software licenses. Can we not devolve into this Silicon Valley corporate speak of rebranding a company ignoring intellectual property as innovation?
- daenz 5y agoIt sounds like you have it all figured out, so I just have one question: if it's not innovative (it's "no different than stackoverflow with X"), then what is your explanation for why the Copilot announcement here received over 2.8k votes? It's so obviously just stackoverflow with a better selection mechanism, so why aren't people treating it as such?
- Barrin92 5y ago
- monokh 5y agoSlightly off topic: Is the git frontend [1] open source? If not, are there some very light self hosting ones like it? [1] https://thelig.ht/code/ https://thelig.ht/code/
- wmichelin 5y agoI was also wondering this. I'm unfamiliar with linux kernel development but this reminds me of that.
- dchest 5y agoThis looks like https://codemadness.org/stagit.html https://codemadness.org/stagit.html Other popular choices are gitweb and cgit (both dynamic).
- prezjordan 5y agoYou may like Fossil! https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
- nfoz 5y agoCheck out sourcehut! https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/
- ddmma 5y agoInterestingly enough only announced copilot as extension this became a problematic while the model generated code since was launched. I suppose it’s difficult to prepare billions of line codes or data points and everyone to be happy.
- Yaina 5y agoThis is not the first person I've seen that ditches GitHub in favor of some other front-end... and it's not uncommon that they look like this which is often baffling to me. Say what you want about GitHub's almost monopoly position, but the UX is really great and accessible even to non-technical people. Maybe you don't need that, maybe you don't want the issue-trackers, but it's worth thinking about who you're excluding with these kind front-ends.
- maximilianroos 5y agoTo what extent are these expressions driven by a genuine allegiance to strict copyright laws? As opposed to an anxiety that a machine might be able to do some of our jobs better than we can?
- nomercy400 5y agoThis is exactly why people have issue with Github's Copilot. It's not the technology, but the fact that any code you pushed to GitHub in the past 13 years is now 'accessible' to anyone. Private repo? Paid account? Deleted repo five years ago? Deleted repo today? Proprietary code? Embarassing commits? Accidental API keys or passwords in commits? All 'available'. It feels like the entirety of GitHub was just 'leaked', and converted into a marketable product. Would you push your code to a service if you knew it could be read by anyone one to ten years from now? Even if you paid to keep it a secret?
- danielbln 5y agoWasn't Codex (the tech underlying CoPilot) trained on purely publicly available repos?
- IshKebab 5y agoYes. nomercy400 is wrong.
- WillDaSilva 5y agoThe issue of deleted repositories being available through it would still exist. Whether or not GitHub should be blamed for that is another matter.
- lolinder 5y agoOnce you put something on the internet, you should assume it still exists out there somewhere even after deleting it. Even before copilot, all credentials that end up in a repo needed to be changed. I'm not sure what's supposed to be different now.
- lars 5y agoYes, it was. From their site: "It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."
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- tvirosi 5y agoThis huge revolt is interesting but I doubt it makes github very scared. They'll just come out with some new version of it which they'll show takes into account licenses (or uses a 10k or something dataset with hand checked licenses) and that'll be that and we'll forget about all this the week after.
- saurik 5y agoAnd yet would they have bothered without the "huge revolt"? I doubt it; what you are actually describing is a scenario where the "huge revolt" succeeded.
- na85 5y agoFeels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright. That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
- MontyCarloHall 5y agoSurprised I had to scroll so far to find this, given how copyleft and straight-up anti-IP so much of the open source community is. I think a lot more people on this site (and in the FOSS community in general) would be on board with Copilot if it respected viral licenses, e.g. if it had a way of inferring that the code it was copying verbatim were GPL-3 and warned the user that including it in their project would require them to GPL-3 their project as well.
- ImprobableTruth 5y agoBut that's literally the issue. The only form of intellectual property that is being damaged by this is copyleft.
- pabs3 5y agoPermissive licenses have requirements too, mostly attribution.
- noobermin 5y agoHonestly, that would fix every issue with it. The laundering of the license is the issue.
- dimgl 5y agoNo no, we get it. Some people, like myself, still think that copyrights serve a purpose.
- Dylan16807 5y agoYou can say both, you know. That it serves a purpose and is too strong. And I notice you didn't say anything about patents?
- sillysaurusx 5y agoAnyone know how they're hosting their repositories? https://thelig.ht/code/ https://thelig.ht/code/ is actually kind of nice and minimalist; I was hoping to set up the same thing, mostly just for kicks.
- linkdd 5y agoThis reminds me of cgit[1], but the UI seems even simpler. [1] - https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/
- lolinder 5y agoGoogling a bit of the stylesheet suggests that it's stagit, a static page generator for git repos: https://codemadness.org/stagit.html https://codemadness.org/stagit.html Contrast these two pages, and you'll see it's a match: https://codemadness.org/git/bmf/log.html https://codemadness.org/git/bmf/log.html https://thelig.ht/code/block-tracing/log.html https://thelig.ht/code/block-tracing/log.html
- sillysaurusx 5y agoWoo! You rock. I was too lazy to do that myself (or at least, lounging around in bed...) so I was hoping a fellow like you would sleuth it. Thank you. :)
- varenc 5y agoit’s built with stagit: https://codemadness.org/stagit.html https://codemadness.org/stagit.html Love the minimal style and monospace font!
- teflodollar 5y agoCgit https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/
- rhn_mk1 5y agoI would be more sympathetic to the idea of the co-pilot if apart from being susceptible to stripping licensing information from permissive and copyleft projects, it could also inject copyright-stripped sources of the same amount of closed source code. As it is now, it works towards weakening the copyright of free software while doing nothing (or very little) to closed software.
- throwaway_09870 5y agoSemi-related question, The MIT license template has "Copyright © 2021 <copyright holders>", but don't I have to register copyrights somewhere? I've always been confused by this. Do I just stick "Copyright MyName" in my GitHub repos? It seems like this is what most people do..
- city41 5y agoIn the US, copyright is automatically granted: "Copyright protection in the United States exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed" https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
- macintux 5y agoCopyright does not require registration, although there may be advantages to doing so.
- jollybean 5y agoThe argument that 'machines can learn from the code to produce something novel' doesn't bode well given copilot may very well produce code that is straight up cut and paste. This just seems like a massive lawsuit waiting to happen. What happens when you discover that you're using '20 lines of code from some GPL'd thing'? What will your lawyers say? Judges? It seems to me that if you use Copilot there's a straight up real world chance you could end up with GPL'd code in your project. It doesn't matter 'how' it got there. I don't understand therefore how any commercial entity could allow this to be used without absolute guarantees they won't end up with GPL'd code. Or worse.
- cjohansson 5y agoIt's strange how this thing was not an opt-in feature at GitHub. I also feel like this thing is a violation of my integrity and I will consider stop using GitHub as well
- lolinder 5y agoFrom their perspective, they weren't doing anything that abused their privileged position. Tabnine trained their model on open source code, much of which was probably hosted on GitHub. Why should GitHub have to ask permission if tabnine didn't? Whether training an ML model on code is fair use is still an open question, but I don't think GitHub is a greater villain here than anyone else doing the same thing (at least until they start using private repos).
- bootlooped 5y agoWhy would they need to ask for opt-in if they believe what they're doing is within the license terms? I don't ask for opt-in when I copy a snippet from Stack Overflow or use some code from an MIT licensed repo. The only question, I think, is if what Copilot does is actually in compliance with the licenses.
- breck 5y agoIt’s time to abolish copyright (http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.html http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendmen...). It absolutely makes no sense—unless your rich and don’t care about the progress of the arts and sciences. You can spin your wheels all you want but going from simple first principles it is fundamentally flawed. If you believe ideas can be property, then you believe people can be property.
- tomtheelder 5y ago> If you believe ideas can be property, then you believe people can be property. Can you defend that? I generally think copyright isn't a great idea as it exists, but this statement feels extremely dubious at best.
- breck 5y ago> Can you defend that? Yes. Though I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, so the delivery may be less than ideal. Copyright gives PersonA legal control over a subset of PersonB's behavior, even when PersonA is not involved. This is hard to defend, unless you are fine with people being property. Slavery gives PersonA legal control over PersonB's behavior. Under Slavery, PersonB has one master with lots of control. Under Copyright, PersonB has lots of masters with small controls. Is there a way to believe that ideas can be property without it being a system of slavery? There's no logical way to make that work. Think about the moment that copyright "expires". At that instant, does matter disappear? Did property vanish? What changed? The only thing that changed was each person suddenly gained a little more freedom—the ability to share a new sequence that they couldn't share before. The property rights that the copyright holder had over other people went away. People became more free. Anyone who thinks for themselves should be able to quickly deduce that these laws are shades of slavery laws, and not about property rights. I figured that out before I could legally drink. It's not that complicated. The question is why are so many duped? I think it's probably a question of priorities (I would say Freedom of Speech and the Press are more fundamental, and then Freedom to Remix and Distribute would be next) or perhaps it's because before the Internet there wasn't enough uncontrolled bandwidth for the truth to get out, or perhaps it's that the people are bombarded over and over again by the big lie from the moment of childhood—look at the FBI Warnings at the beginning of Disney Movies, or the dozens of times per day that you see the phrase "All rights reserved".
- voidnullnil 5y agoThis is hyperbole / pretend outrage. No sane person claims to be outraged at a company because they made a silly oversight in their experimental product. Obviously Github can just create one instance of Copilot trained with each incompatible license. Even if it used heuristics to find out the license, a tiny subset of code that is accidentally admitted into the training would be negligable, and copyright concerns in software have always been already overblown to begin with.
- hawski 5y agoI have some of my code BSD0 licensed (in practice public domain). One thing that I'm vary of regarding Copilot is: what would happen if my code would become a part of some proprietary code by a big multinational corporation and then they would DMCA me out? I'm a bit in the middle of a digital housekeeping and I think I will move my code somewhere else, because of it.
- saurik 5y agoYour code will end up on GitHub anyway if other people find it useful, as the majority of developers don't even understand you can self host git repositories, so they only know how to do their own development by taking the code they find and putting it on GitHub first.
- owlbynight 5y agoHas this person been in a coma? If I utilize a free service on the Internet, I'm trading for some kind of convenience with the knowledge that I am in some way being boned in the backend by teams of people, all of whom are likely more clever than I am and using my patronage to some kind of nefarious end. The Internet isn't really a place to exercise an inflexible moral code. His new repository probably can be traced back to slave labor somehow if someone digs deep enough. Probably won't even take 6 degrees of separation. If it makes it easier for me to code and gives me more time to do something other than work without doing irreprovable harm to some sentient entity, I'm firmly in the who gives a shit camp.
- kennywinker 5y ago> His new repository probably can be traced back to slave labor somehow And you're ok with that? It doesn't HAVE to be like this. Just because you've chosen nihilism, doesn't mean that's the only choice, and it certainly doesn't help anything.
- owlbynight 5y agoOf course I'm not okay with that, but I'm also not disillusioned about my lack of control over the technology in which I've chosen to build my life around. We parasites can't complain really complain that our hosts smell like shit when we're riding them to the bank, can we? It doesn't HAVE to be like this, it just is, and all of the alternatives suck. If you want to choose to inconvenience yourself in order to pass a morality test that doesn't exist, go ahead I suppose.
- einpoklum 5y agoI wish I had the guts to leave only "tombstones" for my GitHub projects, pointing to other sites where they're actually stored. Unfortunately, GitHub enjoys the effect of most people being on it (correct me if I'm wrong), and leaving it is costly, regardless of whether the alternative is a reasonable service or not.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoRegardless on how I feel about this usage, I’d be more concerned with the very real possibility of introducing vulnerabilities this way. Say the copilot takes a snippet from a code base. That snippet had a vulnerability and was fixed by the team that understood the what and how. How does that vulnerability get fixed? Does copilot let the user know months later that snippet used actually is very bad and that the company that originally implemented fixed it and you should too?
- coliveira 5y agoThis is typical Microsoft behavior: embrace, extend, and extinguish. They embraced open source with the intention of controlling (GitHub) and exploiting it. And the interesting thing is that many people fell for this already ancient strategy.
- qayxc 5y agoSo when MS does it it's evil, but it's perfectly fine for everyone else to do it? I also don't see how any of this follows - they could've just crawled GitLab or any other OSS repository. They didn't even need Github for this. Heck, is OpenAI doing embrace, extend, and extinguish on the entire web now, because they use Common Crawl [0] to train GTP-3, which forms the basis of CoPilot? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Crawl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Crawl
- rvz 5y agoWell, I did try to warn the Copilot fanatics [0]. They just downvoted me days ago and here we are. We have a GitHub Copilot backlash against the hype squad. The GitHub CEO is no where to be found to answer the important questions on software licenses, copyright and the legal implications on scraping the source code of tons of projects with those licenses for Copilot. The fact you can only use it in VSCode and with Microsoft having an exclusive deal with OpenAI screams an obvious 'embrace and extend', As for 'Extinguish', they will need to be very creative on that. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27685104
- pmarreck 5y agoShould I agree with this guy if I believe all software should be open-source? I don't think snippets of code have copyright strength; we pass them around constantly in Slack chatrooms, IRC and Stackoverflow...
- nilshauk 5y agoI used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company. Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value. I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend to vote with my feet and abandon the platform by self-hosting Gitea. By itself it won’t be a big splash but I’m inspired by posts such as this and I hope to inspire someone else in turn. Of all people we devs should be able to find good ways to decentralize.
- Karrot_Kream 5y agoWhat does this have to do with Copilot?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nilshauk 5y agoThanks for the question. Well. I put my AGPLv3-licensed code on GitHub to help other developers. I didn’t do this to help GitHub / Microsoft build a closed-source tool to monopolize the (F)OSS market. It’s interesting how incumbent companies such as Google and GitHub try to capitalize on their user data with machine learning in any way they can to maximize shareholder value. GH and MS spend a lot of time talking about how important open source is to them. They didn’t exactly prove this by building Copilot to be so oblivious about licensing. Either they took a gamble and hope they’d get away with it or it didn’t occur to them that this would be a problem at all. Either way, I’ve lost faith in GH's ability to act in the best interest of its users and the larger open source community. It’s a free market and I hope to see more competition in this space: Both from GitHub-alternatives that respect code-licenses and from self-hosting alternatives.
- remram 5y agoIn this case that might not help you at all. If your project is popular enough, somebody will mirror it on GitHub, where they are free (or believe they are) to incorporate your code in Copilot. Voting with your feet might be helpful long-term but will not protect you from this particular "feature".
- 29athrowaway 5y agoMicrosoft being Microsoft.
- crazypython 5y agoGitLab is pretty good: https://gitlab.com https://gitlab.com Many of its features are available in the self-hostable free and open-source version, GitLab CE.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI'm looking for a new place, because of GitHub's new policy of not supporting password authentication. I sometimes code from devices which are not my own and on which key management is a major impediment and accessibility issue for me. Does anyone know how those listings were generated? I like their simplicity, and would like to do something similar.
- NomDePlum 5y agoVery simplistically, my understanding on these matters is: "You know what you know."
- qayxc 5y agoThe irony of it all is that their code will find its way into the next Common Crawl release anyway and that's used to train GPT-3, which in turn forms the basis of OpenAI Codex, which is the product that CoPilot builds on... So hosting elsewhere might not safe your code from ending up deep in the bowels of some corporate black-box ML model that occasionally regurgitates your IP if accidentally given the wrong (right?) prompt. If you make your code public, you basically accept that someone will copy it verbatim. Other companies still might have it in their closed source product somewhere, even if it's just accidental copypasta from SO.
- Jetrel 5y agoThe real dark bit there is that if someone else posts something publicly, but your own stuff is "obscured" in some way, they may be able to (falsely) claim prior art, as the original author. Amongst other things, hosting something on github is a public ledger of authorship.
- smartmic 5y agoMaybe now is the time to release a GPLv4 extending-restricting-relating the four freedoms to non-humans. I expect the best lawyers from Microsoft have had a look into this and maybe there a weaknesses in GPLv3 ready to exploit for corporate AIs. What is the response from the FSF?
- zmmmmm 5y agoSeems to me like they need to back out of this fast and at very least limit it such that it is only trained and then used on "license compatible" projects. eg: train it in isolation on MIT licensed projects and then have the user explicitly confirm what license the code they are working on is to enable it. Possibly they even need to auto-enable a mechanism to detect when code has been reused verbatim and enable some kind of attribution (or respect for other constraints) where that is required by the license.
- shadowgovt 5y agoAlternatively, they'll take it head-on, pay their lawyers to argue fair use, and blaze a new trail through the understanding of copyright application that allows this ML model (and others like it) to exist. This is ultimately a Microsoft project, and they have Microsoft money and Microsoft lawyers to defend their position.
- ta1234567890 5y agoIt seems like the most fair way to go would be for Copilot to be completely open sourced and hosted on GitHub. That way they’d be subject to the same terms/conditions they are imposing on everyone else’s code/repos.
- adamtulinius 5y agoThe problem isn't the source code of Copilot, but the code it is outputting.
- cj 5y agoThey aren’t using private repos in their training data.
- devinplatt 5y ago> This product injects source code derived from copyrighted sources into the software of their customers without informing them of the license of the original source code. This significantly eases unauthorized and unlicensed use of a copyright holder's work. It appears that GitHub wishes to address this issue via UI changes to Copilot. A quote from a recent post on GitHub[0]: > When a suggestion contains snippets copied from the training set, the UI should simply tell you where it’s quoted from. You can then either include proper attribution or decide against using that code altogether. > This duplication search is not yet integrated into the technical preview, but we plan to do so. And we will both continue to work on decreasing rates of recitation, and on making its detection more precise. That post is also on the Hacker News front page right now[1], but has 10% of the upvotes as this post so it's less visible. I'm hoping all the criticism will encourage GitHub to make a better product. [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27723710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27723710
- tyrex2017 5y agoMy feeling is that only 30% of the outrage against Copilot is honest. 50% is anti-big-tech and 20% is our fear of being made redundant.
- talkingtab 5y agoThe essential isue is simple: taking someone's work product and financially profiting from that work without paying for it. No matter what, that is just wrong.
- bootlooped 5y agoI have read a lot of open source code, somebody's work product, never paid to read it, and with that knowledge gotten a job which pays me. Is that wrong?
- dang 5y agoRecent and related: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 - July 2021 (625 comments) GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687450 - June 2021 (449 comments) Also ongoing, and more or less a duplicate of this one: GitHub scraped your code. And they plan to charge you - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27724008 - July 2021 (148 comments) Original thread: GitHub Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266 - June 2021 (1255 comments)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- soheil 5y agoTo address a lot of the negativity around copyright fair-use, Copilot should have probably adopted something like Stackoverflow's model where contributors get rewarded by points. In this case the repo that the code used by Copilot came from would get a new type of star rating and the more people used it Copilot would assign more stars. Fractional stars would be awarded depending on what fraction of each code snippet Copilot thinks came from a specific repo... It could maybe at some point send rewards in form of donations etc. from Copilot users, similar to Sponsored repos.
- wyldfire 5y agoWhat a cool court case this would make. Is copilot's model sufficiently abstracted from the code it has read? Judges and juries learning about how the GitHub team avoided overfitting? Are humans who have read open source code producing derivative works? Won't be long until we see an infringement case. /me grabs popcorn
- booleangate 5y agoThere’s a lot of consternation over copyright issues, but I see an entirely different problem. When I hear this tool described and see it’s examples the first thing I think is that Github has just automated the dubious process of copy/pasting from StackOverflow. As a senior developer, I am strongly biased against the SO+c/p programming approach that I’ve seen many Junior and mid level developers use. There’s certainly a time and place for it when you become really stuck but at least having to go out and find the code yourself requires thought which helps you grow. My gut reaction to Copilot is that adding this automation into IDEs is going to have a net-negative effect on growing developers as it lowers the level of thought and effort necessary to write even trivial applications. This is a huge detriment to learning. You don’t even get the chance to try to solve the problems yourself because the AI is going to be proactively getting in the way of your learning. All that being said, I think a tool like this could be of great use with boilerplate within a project — but only suggesting things from that project. For example, setting up a new api route, dependency injection, error propagation, etc. Help with all of these mechanical things would be awesome.
- foobarbazetc 5y agoWe’re going to see license additions that explicitly ban ML from being trained on the code soon. Fun.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoMy prediction is that they will add a licence tooltip in the code completion ui and solve that issue next month.
- ipaddr 5y agoIs there a local open source version of this?
- supergirl 5y agohow well does copilot respect licenses? I'm willing to bet it accidentally ingested some GPL code and will be spitting it out at some point. would that be allowed by GPL? also, someone could deliberately obfuscate the license text to fool it but still be clear enough for humans. something like "License: if you use this source code to train a bot then you must obtain a commercial license, otherwise MIT license applies". bot searches for "MIT" and thinks it's safe.
- dspoka 5y agoI think the reaction from software devs on how Copilot's uses their code for ML is interesting in that all the ML companies have been doing this with all other forms of produced content: texts, posts, messages, photo captions, etc. And most likely even less care went into adhering to laws or ethics. Yes code has licenses and thus more distinct legal ramifications but on the other side are people who don't really understand that every time they interact with software or produce some content, everything is gathered and harnessed to power all these companies.
- MillenialMan 5y agoI think there's an argument to be made that neural nets are in some sense a form of compression. The model is a lossy compressed representation of the data. So training a model on copyrighted data is quite direct copyright infringement - you're compressing, then redistributing. Has this ever been used as an argument in a legal case?
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y agoClass action against Microsoft if they use CoPilot for the commercial purpose?
- Barrin92 5y agoFor anyone who thinks this is even remotely okay, answer me this. Imagine that Copilot is actually just a gigantic PR campaign, and when you send a completion request, they do this: They send the request off to a sweatshop in Bangladesh where a bunch of mechanical turk workers scroll through licensed codebases, find an appropriate snippet of code, agree on the best one, strip all of the licenses and attributions out, and send it back to you. (turns out they're very quick at their job) How is this any different than what Copilot does with the purely technical difference that you're pushing code through an artifical neural net instead of a bunch of human ones. Why is that supposed to matter
- iafisher 5y agoIn your hypothetical 100% of completions are copied verbatim from existing code. But if GitHub is to believed, only 0.1% are.
- daenz 5y agoIt doesn't sound like the person you're replying to understands that the code returned is largely synthesized with OpenAI's Codex. It is not simply a "snippet selection" mechanism, it has "learned" (to a limited degree) patterns in code, and can generate those patterns even if they don't exist verbatim from the training set.
- bogwog 5y agoIf I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd think this was just the latest plot by Microsoft to attack open source software. The only reason open source software is possible is because of the protections offered by copyright. Copilot basically shits all over that.
- teh_klev 5y agoI see lots of comments blaming MS about this turn of events. But what did we expect from GitHub....MS or not? This was an obvious survival mechanism for GitHub sans MS. All that coding data there? Let's turn machine learning or AI onto that and make something. And of MS were treating GitHub as an "at arms length" corporate entity with their own lawyers etc such as to NOT
- teh_klev 5y agoI see lots of comments blaming MS about this turn of events. I think this project has been going on pre-MS. But what did we expect from GitHub....MS or not? This was an obvious survival mechanism for GitHub sans MS. All that coding data there? Let's turn machine learning or AI onto that and make something. And if MS were treating GitHub as an "at arms length" corporate entity so as to NOT to upset the opensource/free software community (because MS) then the blame lies fair and square with the management of GitHub.
- nklop 5y agoSo I'm guessing we just need to wait for the court cases to resolve the various issues with this. Won't that be fun? But is that really likely? My sense is that this is either: a storm in a teacup; a blackhole that swallows everything around it; a massive copyright mess that piles up without anyone noticing then explodes all over everything; or something else entirely. The next few years will be interesting then. I'm wondering what happens if/when a significant chunk of GPL code gets included into a commercial product. That will get lively. Popcorn with butter please.
- richdougherty 5y agoTo avoid copyright issues could we do to do it how humans do it - with "clean-room design"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design E.g. 1. Train one ML implementation to produce "specification text" in a way that they're agreed to be free from copyright claims. E.g. train to avoid any direct quoting, possibly via a different human, programming or custom specification language. 2. Train a separate ML implementation to produce code from the specifications. 3. Hook them together and you've got a pipeline for generating learned, but copyright-free, code. Kind of reminds me a bit of some of the machine translation work with human languages. Note: this is how the GNU project itself sometimes clones the functionality of copyright-free way, so I'm pretty sure it would be safe to use this on GPL-licensed code.
- rizky05 5y agoWhy is this a problem when github does it, when tabnine has been doing this for a long time ?
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoFirst they came for the manufacturing jobs, but I did not care because I wasn't in manufacturing. Then they came for the warehouse and shipping jobs, but I did not care because I wasn't in a warehouse. Then they came for the call center jobs, but I did not care, because I did not work in a call center. I was safe, because they could never automate programming.
- heavyset_go 5y agoI wonder if there will be a class action lawsuit coming from this.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- leonewton253 5y agoThanks nerd for promoting copilot! I used to be obsessed with OSS ideology years ago too when I was younger. It a mental virus. I've been cured for years now. Hope you get better.
- kaimorid 5y agook
- nathias 5y agoHow is it different to a dev reading your code and implementing it?
- jiggawatts 5y agoEven if they restricted the training set to 100% open source code, that still begs the question: which license? MIT? GPL 2? GPL 3? BSD? Apache? They're not interchangeable, and not all are directly compatible.
- berkes 5y agoImagine the headache of a project where each file has it's own FLOSS licence. Or each class or function even.
- claudiot 5y agoWhy don't have a look to european laws on copyright and text mining activities? I think it is relevant: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj
- dekhn 5y agoSo sue them (class action lawsuit on behalf of everybody who contributed restrictive licensed code). That's the only way this issue is going to be resolved any time soon.