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1. Someone expressed their concern that fragments of GPL code would end up in projects with non-GPL licenses and called it open source laundering. They were als

1. Someone expressed their concern that fragments of GPL code would end up in projects with non-GPL licenses and called it open source laundering. They were also concerned about the interpretation of derivative work. Could copilot's output be considered a derivative work? https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128?lang=en https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128?lang=en 2. Someone posted how copilot reproduced the famous fast inverse square root function verbatim, including comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287

an_opabinia 5y ago
> open source laundering Microsoft already launders open source code by just hiring people in China and Romania to rewrite it. Copilot is their engineering culture distilled. However most big companies do this.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Rewriting isn’t the same thing. Otherwise you could claim libreoffice devs are just laundering closed source Microsoft office code.
- fsloth 5y ago
  Rewriting is totally ok. In every possible context. Because the opposite (blocking rewriting by some legal mechanism) would mean a past employer could slap a court order stopping a programmer from working ever again in any other company due to IP infringement since he could 'just copy his previous work and hence company ip'.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> concern that fragments of GPL code would end up in projects with non-GPL licenses Framing it like this makes it sound like a problem with the GPL in particular, when really it's a problem for anything (including ingested code with no discernable license) that isn't expressly available under permissive licenses--more permissive than even the BSDs or MIT license, which after all, still require attribution by way of reproducing any copyright notices and distributing the text of the license itself. The only terms where this isn't really a problem is limited to basically WTFPL and public domain code.
belorn 5y ago
One more critical aspect of the issue: 3. Microsoft decided to exclude proprietary code from copilot learning date. If they were concerned that copilot's output might infringe on other companies proprietary code, they should have the same concerns about free and open source licensed code.

an_opabinia 5y ago

> open source laundering Microsoft already launders open source code by just hiring people in China and Romania to rewrite it. Copilot is their engineering culture distilled. However most big companies do this.

kortilla 5y ago
Rewriting isn’t the same thing. Otherwise you could claim libreoffice devs are just laundering closed source Microsoft office code.
fsloth 5y ago
Rewriting is totally ok. In every possible context. Because the opposite (blocking rewriting by some legal mechanism) would mean a past employer could slap a court order stopping a programmer from working ever again in any other company due to IP infringement since he could 'just copy his previous work and hence company ip'.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

> concern that fragments of GPL code would end up in projects with non-GPL licenses Framing it like this makes it sound like a problem with the GPL in particular, when really it's a problem for anything (including ingested code with no discernable license) that isn't expressly available under permissive licenses--more permissive than even the BSDs or MIT license, which after all, still require attribution by way of reproducing any copyright notices and distributing the text of the license itself. The only terms where this isn't really a problem is limited to basically WTFPL and public domain code.

belorn 5y ago

One more critical aspect of the issue: 3. Microsoft decided to exclude proprietary code from copilot learning date. If they were concerned that copilot's output might infringe on other companies proprietary code, they should have the same concerns about free and open source licensed code.