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The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people

by davisr 5y ago

The 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 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.

xxpor 5y ago
Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing for (int i = 0; i < idx; i++) {.
- bluGill 5y ago
  While they are not tested, anything other than accepting the idea kills the idea of software completely. There is lots of room to change details, but somehow copyright and the fact that the code is copied into computer memory needs to be reconciled.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    I don't see how. It might kill specific ideological licensing of software code, but the idea it'd kill software as a whole is pretty unbelievable. Software is too valuable to society. As we're seeing, there's VERY little software where the specific algorithms or ideas in the software are what's valuable. The value comes from the ability to sell a service based on the software and operate it at scale. Like you said, how much SaaS is mostly open source stuff packaged up? Android is (sort of) open source, companies pay lots of people a lot of money to contribute to the Linux kernel where they give away the code they developed with that money, etc etc.
- api 5y ago
  What about non-traditional-FOSS licenses? There is a lot of source-available not-OSI-compliant licensed software on GitHub like MongoDB, CockroachDB, etc., and that's clearly proprietary. If this thing is trained on that and generates what amount to snippets of that code then it's clearly violating those licenses. Then there's private repositories. If they included those in the training data set that's even more actionable. Personally I think this is software piracy at an absolutely unprecedented scale. Machine learning is just information transfer from the training data into weights in a model, a close relative of lossy data compression. Microsoft is now reselling all its GitHub users' code for profit.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Private repositories weren't included in the training data per-github, only public repos. This really doesn't give me much comfort though. Making a repo public doesn't imply anything, it could be "All rights reserved".
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable Microsoft did not just copy individual lines. They fed whole repositories into their model, ignoring the license (if it exists) even though they knew from the start that information generated by the model will be publicly available. Available usually out of context, but nonetheless - the scope of the input and intent are very clearly "everything" and "redistribution". Just adding a filter/ML model to the output shouldn't matter. I dare you to build a Copilot clone trained from leaked internal Microsoft code and then trying to argue the output is a bit mixed up. That is a clear violation imho.
  - google234123 5y ago
    Copilot was trained on leaked internal Microsoft code that's on github at the moment. Anyway, everyone seems perfectly ok with training langauge models on copyright text.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      If a trained language model exactly reproduces copyrighted text, is there any question about whether copyright still applies?
      - TchoBeer 5y ago
        This is a useless hypothetical, no language models do that
        heavyset_go 5y ago
        And yet there are plenty of examples of Copilot reproducing copyrighted code verbatim, like is does in this example[1] that was posted on HN. [1] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
        jen20 5y ago
        This is precisely what Copilot does, regularly.
- ghoward 5y ago
  You're right that code has to demonstrate creativity for copyright. But that also means that an algorithm, even a transformative algorithm, cannot change copyright because an algorithm is not creative, by definition. This means that the output of any algorithm on copyrighted code is still under the original copyright. I mean, we still apply the copyright of the original to the output of compilers, even though compilers can be transformative with inlining and link-time optimization, to the point that it mixes disparate code in the same way Copilot does. In fact, I wrote some software licenses [1] that codify the fact that algorithms cannot change copyright. [1]: https://yzena.com/licenses/ https://yzena.com/licenses/
  - gradys 5y ago
    You sound very confident about this, whereas copyright lawyers I've read discuss this issue seem much less confident overall, but lean toward thinking this would be fair use. What makes you so confident that this would not be ruled fair use? (And for people not familiar - if ruled fair use, it doesn't matter what the license is because fair use is an exception to copyright itself.)
    - ghoward 5y ago
      I have a feeling you did not read the FAQ of the licenses. I don't blame you, but they explain my position. Here's the relevant quote: > GitHub is arguing that using FOSS code in Copilot is fair use because using data for training a machine learning algorithm has been labelled as fair use. [1] > However, even though the training is supposedly fair use, that doesn’t mean that the distribution of the output of such algorithms is fair use. My licenses say, basically, "Sure, training is fair use, but distributing the output is not." The licenses specifically say that the copyright applies to any output of any algorithm that uses the source code code as all or part of its input. Now, I have not gotten a lawyer to look at my licenses yet (it's in the works), so don't use them yourself. But because everyone keeps saying that training is fair use, I'm fairly confident that only training is fair use. Of course, it might not be, but that would take more court cases and more precedent. I wanted to poison the well now [2] to make companies nervous about using a model that was partially trained with code licensed under my licenses. [1]: https://valohai.com/blog/copyright-laws-and-machine-learning/#fairusedoctrineintheus https://valohai.com/blog/copyright-laws-and-machine-learning... [2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and-machine-learning/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and...
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. I'd argue Microsoft too, was/is overconfident about how this would play out. I would have expected a little more caution on selecting the training data.
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  > Software licenses have barely been tested in court... OSS licenses have been litigated and upheld. Can't supply details of my own experience for confidentiality reasons but plenty of plaintiffs have prevailed in suits about violations of OSS license terms. My guess is the numbers are higher than you might think because a lot of the cases end in non-public settlements.
  - sjy 5y ago
    A confidential settlement does not mean that a licence has been “tested in court” or “litigated and upheld.” It means the parties thought the risk of losing was high enough to justify a settlement. The state of the law remains uncertain because cases are getting settled rather than litigated.
    - hodgesrm 5y ago
      Technically you are right, but the fact that defendants knew they were at high risk of losing means such licenses have teeth.
- austincheney 5y ago
  A software license, like any license, is a permission to operate. > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable It is if you can prove reproduction apart from your own original work (fair use). Unlike patents copyright doesn’t protect uniqueness. It is only a shield from reproduction, and if reproduction is demonstrable to a court you are likely at risk. https://cws.auburn.edu/OVPR/pm/tt/copyrightvplagiarism https://cws.auburn.edu/OVPR/pm/tt/copyrightvplagiarism
- josefx 5y ago
  > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. copilot is known to reproduce entire blocks of text including non functional parts like comments.
echelon 5y ago
> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. For the past ten years we've been spoon fed that it's okay for Open Source / Free Software to be co-opted by giants and subsequently kept private. You'll be harassed for telling people it's wrong for Apple to lock down the iPhone. Or that Google shouldn't be in charge of web standards. Web infrastructure is mostly a bunch of black boxes. How far we've fallen! We need a new cloud provider that is 100% on an open stack. Billing system and all. Richard Stallman is no longer a hero. Yes, he did wrong and gross things, but in the same breath he's brushed under the rug, so are his ideas. We've all been collectively gaslighted. Wake up. Downvoters: Tell me how I'm wrong.
- api 5y ago
  Most of the people who go nuts when you point these things out are FOSS zealots reacting to the idea that FOSS licenses should be adjusted to prevent billion dollar companies from co-opting it for profit.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Profit is fine. Building anti-competitive monopolies that don't share and that seek to own more and more of computing was an unanticipated side effect.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      I don't think there's a single "anti-competitive monopoly" today that has less FOSS involvement than any major software company in the 20th century.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Isn't that exactly what a lot of open source licenses have permitted due to hiding things behind SaaS layers rather than distributing products?
- filoleg 5y ago
  > Yes, he did wrong and gross things, but in the same breath he's brushed under the rug, so are his ideas. His ideas being "brushed under the rug" had nothing to do with his public "cancellation" that happened in the past few years. Stallman has always been an extreme purist that prioritized his ideological stance over anything else that matters to users. And his ideas were "brushed under the rug" just as much 5 years ago (before public revelations about his misdoings) as they are now. It might just feel like he has been increasingly "brushed under the rug" more recently because he has been becoming increasingly irrelevant and more of just a spokesperson.
api 5y ago
But don't you get it? The purpose of FOSS is to provide free labor for billion dollar companies.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  A non-trivial amount of FOSS is contributed by programmers on the clock working for those same billion dollar companies.
swayson 5y ago
Very well put and refreshing. Thank you.
hartator 5y ago
> Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Why not both? Copyright certainly matters. It's a big deal legally and economicically all over the world. Suppose that it's just a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Does that mean that I should release my code into the public domain? I think you could make a good case that even being totally opposed to copyright morally or pragmatically or otherwise, given that it currently is enforced in many places it's worthwhile to play along. For example, some people would prefer a world without copyright, but GPL their code, because it might prevent a greater evil.
  - dcow 5y ago
    Exactly. The copyleft side of me says you can't copyright instructions on how to bake a cake, or a fast route across a city, or a beautiful way to display colored pixels in a grid, or an efficient compression scheme for video data... because it's all intellectual, and not physical, "property". But society disagrees so a nice hack on copyright that perpetually keeps any of the above from being stolen and locked down by profit seeking psychopaths just early enough to the scene to make a buck, seems like the best interim solution.
    - runnerup 5y ago
      I really appreciate yours and parents line of reasoning.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  True, but while they exist,they should be evenly applied
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing their code altogether.
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
If I ever receive monetary compensation for violation of the license on my repositories, I will personally deliver it to you in cash. It won't happen. I have a feeling Copilot is more of a tool for publicity than for development.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  That statement sort of depends on how important your repos are
heavyset_go 5y ago
> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.
- cromka 5y ago
  Case closed, everybody go home.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Microsoft (presumably) did train it on their open source repositories, since those repositories are public GitHub repos. They didn't train it on anybody's private repositories.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    The point is, if they're sure they won't be recycling copyrighted code wholesale, why not include their own in the training set. Surely their internal code is higher quality than the average git repo, which must be 80% abandonware (if my personal repos are anything to go by :P)
    - comex 5y ago
      Probably because of the (very small) chance that Copilot could regurgitate something secret or embarrassing. Which is not necessarily hypocritical. The amount of copying needed for something to be copyright infringement is not high… but it's still significantly higher than the amount needed to leak information. For that, just a few words will do, e.g. // For Windows 12 or // Fuck [company name] or long secret_key[2] = {0x1234567812345678, 0x8765432187654321};
      - thayne 5y ago
syshum 5y ago
Thank you...
JTbane 5y ago
>I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation So much this. If a neural network is capable of regurgitating code verbatim (with comments!), it's not a stretch to say it's a derivative work of the GPL code used to feed it.
pabs3 5y ago
If Copilot is violating the GPL license family, then it is also violating the permissive licenses like MIT too.
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  How so? the MIT license allows you to do everything with the code. It doesn't allow to sue the author, but that's about it. Here it is: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
  - bblough 5y ago
    From your link: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Not including the copyright information for the MIT-licensed code is a violation of the license.
    - MichaelMoser123 5y ago
      depends on what is a 'substantial portion' of the software. i think that definition is not very clear.
      - bblough 5y ago
        No, it's not clear, and I guess that's up to the courts to decide. But in my (non-lawyer) opinion - if the reproduced code is substantial/unique enough to be deemed to be covered by the license, then it's also substantial/unique enough to be subject to that license requirement.
snarky_birdie 5y ago
>I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game You don't have to use Github to have a skin in the game. As long as someone has access to your open source code, no matter where it's hosted, anyone is free to upload it to Github. The open source license of your code allows that.

by davisr 5y ago

xxpor 5y ago

Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone how they apply to code injected and combined with other code via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to worry about writing for (int i = 0; i < idx; i++) {.

bluGill 5y ago
While they are not tested, anything other than accepting the idea kills the idea of software completely. There is lots of room to change details, but somehow copyright and the fact that the code is copied into computer memory needs to be reconciled.
- xxpor 5y ago
  I don't see how. It might kill specific ideological licensing of software code, but the idea it'd kill software as a whole is pretty unbelievable. Software is too valuable to society. As we're seeing, there's VERY little software where the specific algorithms or ideas in the software are what's valuable. The value comes from the ability to sell a service based on the software and operate it at scale. Like you said, how much SaaS is mostly open source stuff packaged up? Android is (sort of) open source, companies pay lots of people a lot of money to contribute to the Linux kernel where they give away the code they developed with that money, etc etc.
api 5y ago
What about non-traditional-FOSS licenses? There is a lot of source-available not-OSI-compliant licensed software on GitHub like MongoDB, CockroachDB, etc., and that's clearly proprietary. If this thing is trained on that and generates what amount to snippets of that code then it's clearly violating those licenses. Then there's private repositories. If they included those in the training data set that's even more actionable. Personally I think this is software piracy at an absolutely unprecedented scale. Machine learning is just information transfer from the training data into weights in a model, a close relative of lossy data compression. Microsoft is now reselling all its GitHub users' code for profit.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Private repositories weren't included in the training data per-github, only public repos. This really doesn't give me much comfort though. Making a repo public doesn't imply anything, it could be "All rights reserved".
alpaca128 5y ago
> it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable Microsoft did not just copy individual lines. They fed whole repositories into their model, ignoring the license (if it exists) even though they knew from the start that information generated by the model will be publicly available. Available usually out of context, but nonetheless - the scope of the input and intent are very clearly "everything" and "redistribution". Just adding a filter/ML model to the output shouldn't matter. I dare you to build a Copilot clone trained from leaked internal Microsoft code and then trying to argue the output is a bit mixed up. That is a clear violation imho.
- google234123 5y ago
  Copilot was trained on leaked internal Microsoft code that's on github at the moment. Anyway, everyone seems perfectly ok with training langauge models on copyright text.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    If a trained language model exactly reproduces copyrighted text, is there any question about whether copyright still applies?
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      This is a useless hypothetical, no language models do that
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        And yet there are plenty of examples of Copilot reproducing copyrighted code verbatim, like is does in this example[1] that was posted on HN. [1] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
      - jen20 5y ago
        This is precisely what Copilot does, regularly.
ghoward 5y ago
You're right that code has to demonstrate creativity for copyright. But that also means that an algorithm, even a transformative algorithm, cannot change copyright because an algorithm is not creative, by definition. This means that the output of any algorithm on copyrighted code is still under the original copyright. I mean, we still apply the copyright of the original to the output of compilers, even though compilers can be transformative with inlining and link-time optimization, to the point that it mixes disparate code in the same way Copilot does. In fact, I wrote some software licenses [1] that codify the fact that algorithms cannot change copyright. [1]: https://yzena.com/licenses/ https://yzena.com/licenses/
- gradys 5y ago
  You sound very confident about this, whereas copyright lawyers I've read discuss this issue seem much less confident overall, but lean toward thinking this would be fair use. What makes you so confident that this would not be ruled fair use? (And for people not familiar - if ruled fair use, it doesn't matter what the license is because fair use is an exception to copyright itself.)
  - ghoward 5y ago
    I have a feeling you did not read the FAQ of the licenses. I don't blame you, but they explain my position. Here's the relevant quote: > GitHub is arguing that using FOSS code in Copilot is fair use because using data for training a machine learning algorithm has been labelled as fair use. [1] > However, even though the training is supposedly fair use, that doesn’t mean that the distribution of the output of such algorithms is fair use. My licenses say, basically, "Sure, training is fair use, but distributing the output is not." The licenses specifically say that the copyright applies to any output of any algorithm that uses the source code code as all or part of its input. Now, I have not gotten a lawyer to look at my licenses yet (it's in the works), so don't use them yourself. But because everyone keeps saying that training is fair use, I'm fairly confident that only training is fair use. Of course, it might not be, but that would take more court cases and more precedent. I wanted to poison the well now [2] to make companies nervous about using a model that was partially trained with code licensed under my licenses. [1]: https://valohai.com/blog/copyright-laws-and-machine-learning/#fairusedoctrineintheus https://valohai.com/blog/copyright-laws-and-machine-learning... [2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and-machine-learning/ https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and...
sangnoir 5y ago
> You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually play out. I'd argue Microsoft too, was/is overconfident about how this would play out. I would have expected a little more caution on selecting the training data.
hodgesrm 5y ago
> Software licenses have barely been tested in court... OSS licenses have been litigated and upheld. Can't supply details of my own experience for confidentiality reasons but plenty of plaintiffs have prevailed in suits about violations of OSS license terms. My guess is the numbers are higher than you might think because a lot of the cases end in non-public settlements.
- sjy 5y ago
  A confidential settlement does not mean that a licence has been “tested in court” or “litigated and upheld.” It means the parties thought the risk of losing was high enough to justify a settlement. The state of the law remains uncertain because cases are getting settled rather than litigated.
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    Technically you are right, but the fact that defendants knew they were at high risk of losing means such licenses have teeth.
austincheney 5y ago
A software license, like any license, is a permission to operate. > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable It is if you can prove reproduction apart from your own original work (fair use). Unlike patents copyright doesn’t protect uniqueness. It is only a shield from reproduction, and if reproduction is demonstrable to a court you are likely at risk. https://cws.auburn.edu/OVPR/pm/tt/copyrightvplagiarism https://cws.auburn.edu/OVPR/pm/tt/copyrightvplagiarism
josefx 5y ago
> it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable. copilot is known to reproduce entire blocks of text including non functional parts like comments.

echelon 5y ago

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. For the past ten years we've been spoon fed that it's okay for Open Source / Free Software to be co-opted by giants and subsequently kept private. You'll be harassed for telling people it's wrong for Apple to lock down the iPhone. Or that Google shouldn't be in charge of web standards. Web infrastructure is mostly a bunch of black boxes. How far we've fallen! We need a new cloud provider that is 100% on an open stack. Billing system and all. Richard Stallman is no longer a hero. Yes, he did wrong and gross things, but in the same breath he's brushed under the rug, so are his ideas. We've all been collectively gaslighted. Wake up. Downvoters: Tell me how I'm wrong.

api 5y ago
Most of the people who go nuts when you point these things out are FOSS zealots reacting to the idea that FOSS licenses should be adjusted to prevent billion dollar companies from co-opting it for profit.
- echelon 5y ago
  Profit is fine. Building anti-competitive monopolies that don't share and that seek to own more and more of computing was an unanticipated side effect.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    I don't think there's a single "anti-competitive monopoly" today that has less FOSS involvement than any major software company in the 20th century.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Isn't that exactly what a lot of open source licenses have permitted due to hiding things behind SaaS layers rather than distributing products?
filoleg 5y ago
> Yes, he did wrong and gross things, but in the same breath he's brushed under the rug, so are his ideas. His ideas being "brushed under the rug" had nothing to do with his public "cancellation" that happened in the past few years. Stallman has always been an extreme purist that prioritized his ideological stance over anything else that matters to users. And his ideas were "brushed under the rug" just as much 5 years ago (before public revelations about his misdoings) as they are now. It might just feel like he has been increasingly "brushed under the rug" more recently because he has been becoming increasingly irrelevant and more of just a spokesperson.

api 5y ago

But don't you get it? The purpose of FOSS is to provide free labor for billion dollar companies.

tomnipotent 5y ago
A non-trivial amount of FOSS is contributed by programmers on the clock working for those same billion dollar companies.

swayson 5y ago

Very well put and refreshing. Thank you.

hartator 5y ago

> Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.

Y_Y 5y ago
Why not both? Copyright certainly matters. It's a big deal legally and economicically all over the world. Suppose that it's just a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Does that mean that I should release my code into the public domain? I think you could make a good case that even being totally opposed to copyright morally or pragmatically or otherwise, given that it currently is enforced in many places it's worthwhile to play along. For example, some people would prefer a world without copyright, but GPL their code, because it might prevent a greater evil.
- dcow 5y ago
  Exactly. The copyleft side of me says you can't copyright instructions on how to bake a cake, or a fast route across a city, or a beautiful way to display colored pixels in a grid, or an efficient compression scheme for video data... because it's all intellectual, and not physical, "property". But society disagrees so a nice hack on copyright that perpetually keeps any of the above from being stolen and locked down by profit seeking psychopaths just early enough to the scene to make a buck, seems like the best interim solution.
  - runnerup 5y ago
    I really appreciate yours and parents line of reasoning.
sangnoir 5y ago
True, but while they exist,they should be evenly applied
warkdarrior 5y ago
If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing their code altogether.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

If I ever receive monetary compensation for violation of the license on my repositories, I will personally deliver it to you in cash. It won't happen. I have a feeling Copilot is more of a tool for publicity than for development.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
That statement sort of depends on how important your repos are

heavyset_go 5y ago

> The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.

cromka 5y ago
Case closed, everybody go home.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zarzavat 5y ago
Microsoft (presumably) did train it on their open source repositories, since those repositories are public GitHub repos. They didn't train it on anybody's private repositories.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  The point is, if they're sure they won't be recycling copyrighted code wholesale, why not include their own in the training set. Surely their internal code is higher quality than the average git repo, which must be 80% abandonware (if my personal repos are anything to go by :P)
  - comex 5y ago
    Probably because of the (very small) chance that Copilot could regurgitate something secret or embarrassing. Which is not necessarily hypocritical. The amount of copying needed for something to be copyright infringement is not high… but it's still significantly higher than the amount needed to leak information. For that, just a few words will do, e.g. // For Windows 12 or // Fuck [company name] or long secret_key[2] = {0x1234567812345678, 0x8765432187654321};
    - thayne 5y ago

syshum 5y ago

Thank you...

JTbane 5y ago

>I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation So much this. If a neural network is capable of regurgitating code verbatim (with comments!), it's not a stretch to say it's a derivative work of the GPL code used to feed it.

pabs3 5y ago

If Copilot is violating the GPL license family, then it is also violating the permissive licenses like MIT too.

MichaelMoser123 5y ago
How so? the MIT license allows you to do everything with the code. It doesn't allow to sue the author, but that's about it. Here it is: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
- bblough 5y ago
  From your link: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Not including the copyright information for the MIT-licensed code is a violation of the license.
  - MichaelMoser123 5y ago
    depends on what is a 'substantial portion' of the software. i think that definition is not very clear.
    - bblough 5y ago
      No, it's not clear, and I guess that's up to the courts to decide. But in my (non-lawyer) opinion - if the reproduced code is substantial/unique enough to be deemed to be covered by the license, then it's also substantial/unique enough to be subject to that license requirement.

snarky_birdie 5y ago

>I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game You don't have to use Github to have a skin in the game. As long as someone has access to your open source code, no matter where it's hosted, anyone is free to upload it to Github. The open source license of your code allows that.