4 ms·

It sounds like the person you're responding to already releases their code under a non-commercial license. The problem with Copilot is that it may allow commerc

It sounds like the person you're responding to already releases their code under a non-commercial license. The problem with Copilot is that it may allow commercial enterprises to avoid such a license by copying the code verbatim from their repositories, possibly without any party involved knowing that it's happened.

jefftk 5y ago
Where are you seeing that they are using a non-commercial license? (And non-commercial licenses are not open source: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd)
- johnday 5y ago
  To me, the sentence > 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. implies that they have code which they are sharing under that proviso. Do you read it differently? You are right about the technical distinction of open source from source-available. I think that the GGP (and myself) were both using it colloquially as a shorthand for source-available.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    Is Copilot trained on source available code? If not, then whatever restrictions you may want to apply with your source available code isn’t relevant. The debate is about copyleft.
    - viktree 5y ago
      The RMS function in Quake Source code exists in the copilot training set (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287) is covered under GPL which is source available (see https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/code/game/q_math.c#L552 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c...)
      - oefrha 5y ago
        GPL is an open source license. Please read the ancestors to understand what’s being discussed here. Edit: I was clearly making a distinction between open source (as in covered by an OSI-approved open source license) and only source-available, rather than treating source-available as a superset of open source.
tluyben2 5y ago
But this is only for snippets right? Which I think is the issue: it has never been tested in court. Basically if you put: /* web user management */ And copilot comes up with complete user management lifted out of another repo with all pages, db structures and logic but the copyrights stripped then yes. But, as I understand it, that is not what it does. You will need to slowly tell it every tiny part of how user mamagement is to be implemented and for those snippets it copies code. But when you are done, there might be snippets from 100s of different repositories potentially. I think it is hard to show that breaks copyright as many people already come up with roughly the same stuff 1000s times/day all over the world.
- johnday 5y ago
  > But when you are done, there might be snippets from 100s of different repositories potentially. Potentially, but not necessarily. It's possible also that if there is only one close match for the logic required, it may produce verbatim something it's already seen. GPT is known to do this for sufficiently precise inputs.

jefftk 5y ago

Where are you seeing that they are using a non-commercial license? (And non-commercial licenses are not open source: https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd)

johnday 5y ago
To me, the sentence > 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. implies that they have code which they are sharing under that proviso. Do you read it differently? You are right about the technical distinction of open source from source-available. I think that the GGP (and myself) were both using it colloquially as a shorthand for source-available.
- oefrha 5y ago
  Is Copilot trained on source available code? If not, then whatever restrictions you may want to apply with your source available code isn’t relevant. The debate is about copyleft.
  - viktree 5y ago
    The RMS function in Quake Source code exists in the copilot training set (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287) is covered under GPL which is source available (see https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/code/game/q_math.c#L552 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c...)
    - oefrha 5y ago
      GPL is an open source license. Please read the ancestors to understand what’s being discussed here. Edit: I was clearly making a distinction between open source (as in covered by an OSI-approved open source license) and only source-available, rather than treating source-available as a superset of open source.

tluyben2 5y ago

But this is only for snippets right? Which I think is the issue: it has never been tested in court. Basically if you put: /* web user management */ And copilot comes up with complete user management lifted out of another repo with all pages, db structures and logic but the copyrights stripped then yes. But, as I understand it, that is not what it does. You will need to slowly tell it every tiny part of how user mamagement is to be implemented and for those snippets it copies code. But when you are done, there might be snippets from 100s of different repositories potentially. I think it is hard to show that breaks copyright as many people already come up with roughly the same stuff 1000s times/day all over the world.

johnday 5y ago
> But when you are done, there might be snippets from 100s of different repositories potentially. Potentially, but not necessarily. It's possible also that if there is only one close match for the logic required, it may produce verbatim something it's already seen. GPT is known to do this for sufficiently precise inputs.