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I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying

• ageyfman 5y ago
  Try doing any type of deal (fundraising, M&A) where you can't point to the provenance of your application's code. This isn't good for programmers, programmers WANT clean and knowable copyrights. This is good for lawyers, who'll now have another way to extract thousands of $$ from companies to launder their code.
  • Houshalter 5y ago
    If you do get sued, the Copilot page is written in a way that would make Github legally responsible for it, not you. "Just like with a compiler, the output of your use of GitHub Copilot belongs to you."
    • BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Yeah, right... This isn't going to fly in court any more than if the Pirate Bay page was written in a way that says that it's solely responsible for what you do with the magnet links that they share.
      • Houshalter 5y ago
        The pirate bay is very clear to not claim any responsibility for what people post on their site. That's how they get away with it.
        • BlueTemplar 5y ago
          I know, it's an hypothetical.
• mupuff1234 5y ago
  I think the real issue is less about the "copying short snippets", and more about how it was done, i.e zero transparency, default opt in without any regards to licensing (with no way to opt out??) and last but not least - planning to charge money for it.
• leventov 5y ago
  Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. Personally, I think that in the age of AI programming any notions of code licensing should be abolished. There is no copyright for genes in nature or memes in culture; similarly, these shouldn't be copyright for code.
  • superfrank 5y ago
    > Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. I still think we're a long way from that. Copilot will help write code quicker, but it's not doing anything you couldn't do with a Google search and copy/paste. Once developers move beyond the jr. level, writing code tends to become the least of their worries. Writing the code is easy, understanding how that code will affect the rest of the system is hard.
    • tylersmith 5y ago
      Based on the responses I've seen, people have it in their heads that Copilot is a system where you describe what kind of software you want and it finds it on Github and slaps your own license on it. It's just a smarter tab-completion.
    • fragmede 5y ago
      Depends on your definition of "a long way". Some of the GPT3 based code generation demos (which, explicitly, are just that - demos - we aren't shown the limitations of the system during the demo) say that's closer than I think. https://analyticsindiamag.com/open-ai-gpt-3-code-generator-app-building/ https://analyticsindiamag.com/open-ai-gpt-3-code-generator-a... has a bunch of videos of this in action.
      • krainboltgreene 5y ago
        That's because the training set had that specific demo, not because copilot imagined up a demo.
  • 5y ago
• corobo 5y ago
  The difference between copilot and copy pasting from stackoverflow is consent
• carom 5y ago
  It is a large corporation eroding the integrity of open source licenses. It is perfectly reasonable to be pissed off about this.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  On many ML posts, you get arguments about IP, and there's a long history of IP wars on this forum, especially when licensing comes up. Then you add the popular Big Tech Is Evil arguments you see. I think it's a variety of factors coming together for people to be upset about someone else profiting from their own work in ways they didn't mean to allow. I expect that we'll need new copyright law to protect creators from this kind of thing (specifically, to give creators an option to make their work public without allowing arbitrary ML to be trained on it). Otherwise the formula for ML based fair use is "$$$ + my things = your things" which is always a recipe for tension.
• papito 5y ago
  In addition, this is extremely hard to enforce. I think the amount of code running in closed systems that does not exactly respect the original license is shocking. What was the last case you know where this was a "scandal"? It only happens at boss level when tech giants litigate IP issues.
• bpodgursky 5y ago
  Hacker News hates everything, especially if it seems to work. Don't read into it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 5y ago
    "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• 63 5y ago
  Firstly it's important to remember that HN is not a single person with a single opinion, but many people with conflicting opinions. Personally I'm just interested in the copyright discussion for the sake of it because I find it interesting. Though, I imagine there's also an amount of feelings of unfairness.
• stusmall 5y ago
  I've always cared but never talked about it. Someone copy and pasting code from a source that is clearly forbidden (free software, reverse engineered code, leaked source code, etc) isn't an interesting thing to talk about. It's obviously wrong. Also people rarely do it; I've caught maybe a couple instances of it in my career and I never really thought too much about them again. This tool helps make it a lot easier and more common. I have a feeling other people chiming in are also in the camp of "Oh, this is going to be a thing now, huh?" I also can't help but to think that my negative opinion of it isn't solely based on this provenance issue. While it's cool it seems questionable about how practical it is. If the value was more clear I think I could stomach the risk a bit better.
• luffapi 5y ago
  > Copilot should be inspiring people to figure out how to do better than it, not making hackers get up in arms trying to slap it down. One of the (many) problems is that GitHub/Microsoft already benefit from runaway network effects so it’s difficult to “do better”. Where will you get all of that training code if not off GitHub? The real answer to this is to yank your projects from GitHub now while you search for alternatives.
  • Narishma 5y ago
    Even if you do that, what's to stop them from using open source software from all over the web and not just what's on GitHub? The only way to stop them then is to go closed source.
    • luffapi 5y ago
      I mean stop them at a larger level by threatening their success as an organization. If developers stop publishing to GitHub they have bigger problems than training ML models. Whether or not this move is “legal”, it should serve as a wake up call that GH is not actually a service we should be empowering. This incident is just one example of why that’s a bad idea.
    • BlueTemplar 5y ago
      They make you give up some of your monopoly rights when you put stuff on Github (some parts of those ToS might or might not be legal). You would have a much stronger case if they had taken your code from elsewhere.
• adamdusty 5y ago
  I'm more surprised that people don't care about the telemetry aspect. It's an extension that sends your code to an MS service, and MS promises access is on a need-to-know basis. I don't care if MS copies my hobby projects exactly, but I'm not sure my employer(defense contractor) would even be allowed to use a tool like this. I think it looks cool though. I will probably try it out if it is ever available for free and works for the languages I use.
  • gradys 5y ago
    It's quite possible to do this on-prem and even on-device. TabNine, a very similar system with a smaller model (based on GPT-2 rather than 3), has existed for years and works on-device.
• sp332 5y ago
  You don't have to be a copyright maximalist to worry about a company taking snippets of code that used to be under an open license and using them in a closed-source app.
• joe_the_user 5y ago
  I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. If you're asking about the moral reaction here, I think it depends on how one views Copilot. Does Copilot create basically original code that just happens to include a few small snippets? Or does Copilot actually generate a large portion of lightly changed code when it's not spitting out verbatim copies of the code? I mean, if you tell Copilot, "make me a QT compatible, crossplatform windowing library" and it spits out a slightly modified version of the QT source code and if someone started distributing that with a very cheap commercial license, that would be a problem for the QT company, which licenses their code commercial or GPL (and as QT a library, the QT GPL forces user to also release their code GPL if they release it, so it's a big restriction). So in the worst case scenario, you can something ethically dubious as well as legally dubious. Copilot should be inspiring people to figure out how to do better than it, not making hackers get up in arms trying to slap it down. Why can't we do both? I mean, I am quite interested in AI and it's progress and I also think it's important to note the way that AI "launders" a lot of things (launders bias, launder source code, etc). AI scanning of job applications has all sorts of unfortunate effects, etc. etc. But my critique of the applications doesn't make me uninterested in the theory, they're two different things.
  • fragmede 5y ago
    A naive developer thinks that they are the source code they write (you're not), and their source code leaking to the world makes them worthless. (Which isn't true, but being that invalidated explains a lot of the fear. Which, welcome to the club, programmers. Automation's here for your job too.) Still, some of the moral outrage here has to do with it coming from Github, and thus Microsoft. Software startup Kite has largely gone under the radar so far, but they launched this back in 2016. Github's late to the game. But look at the difference (and similarities) in responses to their product launch posts here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497111 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037
    • thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
      You've answered your own question. They went under the radar and nobody cared about them. They're not the multibillion company that sued Mike Rowe and keeps ReactOS developers awake at night.
• muyuu 5y ago
  idk, I don't quite enjoy the idea of having my code stolen without any respect for its licence or even attribution but then again I migrated away from github as soon as MS bought it still, it's a matter of principle
• moyix 5y ago
  Programmers love to pretend that they're lawyers, especially when it comes to copyright law. Something about the law really appeals to hackers!
• paxys 5y ago
  It's a pretty standard "big company releases new thing" reaction. HN is usually negative on everything.
• isaac21259 5y ago
  Of copilot were open source I wouldn't have an issue with it. However it is closed source and a later version it's intended to be sold.
• jspaetzel 5y ago
  Copy-left licenses are generally liked by developers, this flys very directly against that since it suggests circumvention of those type of licenses.
• fergie 5y ago
  If very powerful companies are appropriating and reproducing code in contravention of copyright then that is something that should be called out.
• hnbad 5y ago
  I don't know about HN in general but my impression has been that anyone copying random code off the internet or adding dependencies without understanding the license (e.g. just blindly adding AGPL code) would be very much frowned upon in any remotely professional setting because a basic understanding of copyright and open source licensing is expected of even junior developers. "Hackers" "playing" and ignoring copyright is fine, but Copilot isn't promoted as a toy, it's promoted as a tool for professional software development. And in that framing it is about as dangerous as an untrained intern with access to the production server.
• toxik 5y ago
  Is it really confusing? It's a rich company using the fruits of our labor, provided free TO OTHER DEVELOPERS. I have never okayed "use my code to train AIs that nobody else could". It's backhanded and unfair.
• swiley 5y ago
  Copyright defends us from some of the abuse by large corporations in the form of the GPL. Want Linux to run on your thing? You must publish driver source then or you're violating copyright law. This was less a big deal before device vendors ratcheted the pathological behavior up to 11 with smartphones and that's why far more people seem to react far more strongly now.
• strogonoff 5y ago
  As a mature, skilled engineer, you wouldn’t mind sharing your knowledge—but you’d really prefer to do this on your own terms. First, you might choose to distribute your code under a copyleft license to advance the OSS ecosystem. Second, the older you get, the more experience you accumulate, paradoxically the harder it is for you to find a job or advance your career in this industry—so, to maintain at least some source of motivation for tech companies to hire you, you may choose to make some of the source available, but reserve all the rights to it. You’re fine making the source of your tool or library open for anyone to pass through the lens of their own consciousness and learn from it, but not to use as is for own benefit. Now with GitHub Copilot suddenly you see the results of your labour you’ve previously made (under the above assumptions) public being passed through some black box, magically stripped from your license’s protections, and used to provide ready-made solutions to everyone from kids cheating at college tests to well-paid senior engineers simply lacking your expertise. I hope it’s easy to spot how engineer’s interests in the above example are not necessarily aligned with GitHub’s, how this may be perceived as an unfair move disadvantaging veteran rank-and-file software engineers while benefitting corporate elites and investors, and subsequently has the potential to disincentivize source code sharing and deal a blow to OSS ecosystem as a whole.
• davesque 5y ago
  This isn't true at all. There are stories concerning code stealing that regularly lead the front page on HN and rouse a pretty intense reaction from the community. Saying that HNers have never before cared about this issue seems pretty inaccurate or disingenuous.
• wilde 5y ago
  Copilot violates the assumptions many people made when they open sourced their code. Moving from manual to automated use feels like a privacy violation because it dramatically changes the amount of effort it takes to leverage the work in an unintended context.