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I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

MrBoomixer 4y ago
Technically anyone could use those same open source projects and provide an open source solution, or paid solution as well. I do feel how you feel though it's a little off-putting.
- natefinch 4y ago
  The machine learning models are not open source themselves, so you can't just do this yourself with existing open source projects.
w0m 4y ago
Matches my experience. I legitimately like it for quick boiler plates; it's like a better snippet engine. But Paying for it...
- speedgoose 4y ago
  It's worth it if it saves you a few minutes every month.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    Only if it saves you a few minutes every month in a "net" sense. If it saves you dozens of minutes every month and then also costs you dozens of minutes every month in hard-to-predict ways, it's hard to judge either way on it.
josephcsible 4y ago
> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. Yeah, this feels like the same nonsense that scientific journal publishers pull. If your product only has value because of what we made, it's completely unfair to not pay us for our work and then to turn around and charge us to use the output.
- danuker 4y ago
  Also its users might be violating the GPL. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-unacceptable-and-unjust-says-free-software-foundation.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-...
  - tpxl 4y ago
    How can the user be violating the license, not the distributor? If I give you a binary that gives you a Disney movie, it's not you violating the copyright, it's me. The copilot itself is violating the copyright, not its users.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      If you're making software just for your own use, you're right. But most people who make software do distribute it.
    - wtetzner 4y ago
      If the copilot users then distribute the source they got from it, they are at that point violating copyright. E.g., if I take that Disney movie, incorporate it into my own movie, and distribute it, then I'm also violating copyright.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      If you take the Disney movie the binary gives you and then pass it on, you're in violation even if the company distributing the binary is also in violation. You can sue them for damages that result from you being sued but good luck.
lelag 4y ago
Given the cost of the infrastructure needed to run those large language models, it's very likely that Microsoft is still operating copilot at a loss. I don't see an issue with it being a paid service as it is a costly service to provide. What I pity however is that there's no free tier for hobbyists as paying a 10 usd monthly subscription wont make sense when you only code occasionally. For professionals using it everyday, 10 usd / month is inconsequential. I don't think that would have costed them much more to offer a free allowance to cover say an average coding session of 8 hours per month.
- pcl 4y ago
  It’d be nice if they made it free if the upstream repo is published publicly under an open source license. They have all that info already.
- oefrha 4y ago
  GitHub Pro is $4/mo and includes 3000 minutes of CI compute per month (private repos), among all the other features. You’re not going to use 7500 minutes worth of compute a month with Copilot. I’ll certain pay up, though.
  - natefinch 4y ago
    CI runs on CPUs, Copilot runs on GPUs. Waaaay different. Especially in this age of cryptocurrencies and chip shortages.
- az226 4y ago
  It’s free for open source maintainers.
  - blagie 4y ago
    Open source maintainer here. No, it's not. 100% of what I do is open source. It's used by millions. It's free for maintainers of "major" open source projects. I'm not sure what a "major" open source project is, but it's clearly not what I do. The only way to know if your open source project qualifies is to try to sign up. If it does, you're given a free option.
baby 4y ago
> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. "open source is great, except when it's used in a way I don't like"
- karl42 4y ago
  I don't see the use itself as a problem, but rather that the result is not treated as a derivative work of the input. If I train it on GPL code, the result should be GPL, too.
  - natefinch 4y ago
    This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated. Also - there is logic in copilot that checks to make sure it is not suggesting exact duplicates of code from its training set, and if it does, it never sends them to the user.
    - eat_lemons 4y ago
      Read up clean room design and on the IBM bios lawsuits from the 80's and 90's just seeing proprietary code can be a violation Why is it different if we slap a "ml" lable on it
    - hnbad 4y ago
      But Copilot is not a programmer, Copilot is a program. Slapping the "ML" label on a program doesn't magically abdicate its programmers of all responsibility as much as tech companies over the past decade have tried to convince people otherwise.
    - thethirdone 4y ago
      > This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated. I wouldn't put any hard rules on it, but it does seem very fair for programmers who have learned a lot from GPL code to contribute back to GPL projects. I have learned from and used a lot of open source software so whenever possible I try to make projects available to learn from or use.
FinalBriefing 4y ago
Yea...does this mean it will stop working until I pay? It's been really nice for autofilling console logs and boilerplate code...but $10? It's a novelty that is nice when it works, but that's a steep price point for what it is, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
- natefinch 4y ago
  People in the technical preview get a 60 day free trial, but yes, after that, you'll have to pay.
jstummbillig 4y ago
> has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself Sure it has: Time. In terms of economics it's really simple: Does Copilot free up more than 10$ worth of your time per month? If the product works at all as I understand it (I haven't tried), the answer should be a resounding "yes, and then some" for pretty much any SE, given the current market rates. If the answer is no (for example because it produces too many bad suggestions which break your flow), the product simply doesn't work. There might be other reasons for you not to use it. Ego could be one. Your call. > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. I don't know why it would feel any more icky than making money off of open source in other ways.
- richardfey 4y ago
  I could also make a mistake due to Copilot which takes me time to fix, and then I end up spending more time checking code where I previously used it. It has similar pros/cons than copy/pasting
- malux85 4y ago
  I want to love github co-pilot, but its just not there yet. For trivial stuff it's great, but for anything non-trivial it's always wrong. Always. And my problem is : Time. Cycling through false positives and trying to figure out if it's right costs me way more than $10 a month in productivity. I cant wait for better versions to come out, but right now, no.
- plexicle 4y ago
  Yeah it's just practicality for me. There is software I pay a lot more for that I use a lot less. $100/year is a steal for the amount of tedious code copilot helps me with on a daily basis.
- williamstein 4y ago
  It is completely different than using open source programs to make money. Many open source licenses explicitly require any derived work to maintain the copyright notice and a compatible license. If I use github copilot to create a derived work of something somebody else published on GitHub, I have no idea who wrote the upstream code or what license they made it available under. The defense for this is the claim that GitHub copilot doesn’t create a derived work, since the code it produces is very different than anything upstream (this is claimed in the original paper from openai). However, many people have found examples showing this to be a questionable or wishful-thinking claim.
api 4y ago
> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. The business model for most of the Internet is to bait people into using things for free and then monetize them without compensation in some roundabout way.
mikesabbagh 4y ago
I already have it in my visual studio code. I do like it. Will it stop working for me now?
password4321 4y ago
> train on open source projects To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely leaving the Copilot user responsible for copyright infringement.
- causi 4y ago
  Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued. "Hey now, I just hit paste, the software pressed copy by itself" is not going to hold up.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    But if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.
    - causi 4y ago
      Sure, if it's remixed to the point where most people don't go "hey that's Big Bird!" CoPilot doesn't, or at least doesn't always, like when it just copied Quake's fast inverse square code with the verbatim comments including profanity. Using CoPilot to create commercial code opens the coder to significant liability if there's enough money at stake.
      - mnd999 4y ago
        Just argue that you subcontracted that code to Microsoft in good faith for $10/month and pass on the lawsuit to them.
      - 4y ago
tmalsburg2 4y ago
How can it help you to speed up development but not be worth 10$/month. Your hourly rate can’t be that low.
- greatpatton 4y ago
  It's great when it works, and can also be costly when it doesn't or when you blindly trust it.
  - tmalsburg2 4y ago
    Which is just another way of saying that it doesn’t really work, except perhaps for party tricks.
    - qorrect 4y ago
      For me it works wonderfully, when you choose to use it. If you are just blindingly accepting every suggestion, you're going to have a bad time. You also have to (slightly) change your flow to get the most out of it, which I know is a deal breaker for many. I absolutely love it. It's not going to write good code for you, but for an autocompleter it is amazing.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  The fact that GitHub charge only 10$/month suggests that they themselves don’t believe in their product. Because if it would actually work, i.e. speed up software development by, say, >10%, developers should be happy to pay 10 times as much or more.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    This is a rather silly argument... by that logic since using the Adobe suite saves me at least it has a dozen hours every month I would be happy paying $500 a month for it. There's a limit to what individuals are willing to pay for a subscription service irrespective of how many hours it saves you. Now if we're talking enterprise and bulk licensing then that's a separate issue.
snihalani 4y ago
+1 on ickyness
Spartan-S63 4y ago
Agreed. At the very least, I was hoping they'd bundle it with the GitHub Pro subscription for individuals rather than as a separate product.
- hag 4y ago
  Totally agree. I was expecting to get this feature as part of my Pro subscription.
  - russh 4y ago
    I was expecting the same.
uwuemu 4y ago
Depends on your budget of course, but I don't think it's worth $10/month. I pay just a little bit more than that for an entire IDE. The problem with Copilot is that it's USEFUL for boilerplate code and when you need a lot of copypaste "coding" (think APIs, controllers, etc... basically shifting data around the place), but any time you need to actually code something with some actual algorithmic logic behind it, it's little more than a distraction, and often even a really problematic one, because if you let it, it will happily suggest things that look OK on the surface, but are almost always (and I really mean most of the time) wrong, buggy or otherwise incomplete. You can't realy on it. It's like a kid (I wanted to say a "junior programmer", but it's not anywhere near that level) you can offload some chores to, but you always have to check on it and what it actually does. Fine if all you need is to wash the dishes... more than that and you're asking for trouble. When I'm in the flow, trying to solve some algorithmic problem, I always turn it off because the BS suggestions coming from its little "mind" actually slow me down and mess with my focus. Which all makes sense when you realize what it ultimately is - a philosopher, as opposed to a mathematician.
- natefinch 4y ago
  I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some library, I'll let it write it for me, and then double check it to make sure it's doing what I want. That's still faster than me going to check the API and writing it all out by hand. Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.
  - chrisweekly 4y ago
    This seems pretty reasonable to me / resonates w/ how I might use it.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I used copilot yesterday because I wanted a random 10 character long string and was like. Ahh I don’t have the brain power right now to think of this. And remembered I had copilot. So I enabled it. Wrote a comment. And it generated ~10 lines that solved my problem. Tweaked a little bit and rolled with it. It helps solve the boring simple shit so I can focus on the interesting bit.
DustinBrett 4y ago
I went to see the pay URL and it said I was eligible to get it for free. Not sure if that works for some people who contrib to other OSS repo's, but I was about to give up on it when I saw I didn't have to pay, so might be worth checking.
- DustinBrett 4y ago
  Also, $10/mo is not so bad but I am not in the place right now for more subscriptions. I am in the process of stopping several at the moment.
  - deorder 4y ago
    Same here. With prices rising everywhere and a salary of ~40k euros before taxes (which is normal in IT in many EU countries if you don't work for big tech) I hardly have room for another subscription. People here are too quick to say "what is $10 on a $80/hour salary?"
amelius 4y ago
> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. How would you feel if they just provided the software without the model, assuming you could train it yourself on open-source code in an instant?
- dannytatom 4y ago
  I don't know enough about how GTP-3 and ML work to really answer this, but I think I'd be fine with what you're saying if I understand the question. If they provided (and charged) for the infrastructure, but the model was FOSS and community-driven, it would be less icky I think. I just don't like the idea of taking people's work (without asking or checking licenses) and then selling it back to them. It'd be like if Stack Overflow decided to start charging to see answers and not asking or giving a split to the person who gave the answer. I realize they aren't just copy/pasting so not a perfect parallel, but still.
jsharf 4y ago
They still have to pay for servers and maintain the model itself. A neural network isn't just the data -- training and commercializing it (testing, QA, etc) is a lot of work. You wouldn't have an issue with someone making money by using open source software (like a website that is hosted on a server running linux).

MrBoomixer 4y ago

Technically anyone could use those same open source projects and provide an open source solution, or paid solution as well. I do feel how you feel though it's a little off-putting.

natefinch 4y ago
The machine learning models are not open source themselves, so you can't just do this yourself with existing open source projects.

w0m 4y ago

Matches my experience. I legitimately like it for quick boiler plates; it's like a better snippet engine. But Paying for it...

speedgoose 4y ago
It's worth it if it saves you a few minutes every month.
- Taywee 4y ago
  Only if it saves you a few minutes every month in a "net" sense. If it saves you dozens of minutes every month and then also costs you dozens of minutes every month in hard-to-predict ways, it's hard to judge either way on it.

josephcsible 4y ago

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. Yeah, this feels like the same nonsense that scientific journal publishers pull. If your product only has value because of what we made, it's completely unfair to not pay us for our work and then to turn around and charge us to use the output.

danuker 4y ago
Also its users might be violating the GPL. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-unacceptable-and-unjust-says-free-software-foundation.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-...
- tpxl 4y ago
  How can the user be violating the license, not the distributor? If I give you a binary that gives you a Disney movie, it's not you violating the copyright, it's me. The copilot itself is violating the copyright, not its users.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    If you're making software just for your own use, you're right. But most people who make software do distribute it.
  - wtetzner 4y ago
    If the copilot users then distribute the source they got from it, they are at that point violating copyright. E.g., if I take that Disney movie, incorporate it into my own movie, and distribute it, then I'm also violating copyright.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    If you take the Disney movie the binary gives you and then pass it on, you're in violation even if the company distributing the binary is also in violation. You can sue them for damages that result from you being sued but good luck.

lelag 4y ago

Given the cost of the infrastructure needed to run those large language models, it's very likely that Microsoft is still operating copilot at a loss. I don't see an issue with it being a paid service as it is a costly service to provide. What I pity however is that there's no free tier for hobbyists as paying a 10 usd monthly subscription wont make sense when you only code occasionally. For professionals using it everyday, 10 usd / month is inconsequential. I don't think that would have costed them much more to offer a free allowance to cover say an average coding session of 8 hours per month.

pcl 4y ago
It’d be nice if they made it free if the upstream repo is published publicly under an open source license. They have all that info already.
oefrha 4y ago
GitHub Pro is $4/mo and includes 3000 minutes of CI compute per month (private repos), among all the other features. You’re not going to use 7500 minutes worth of compute a month with Copilot. I’ll certain pay up, though.
- natefinch 4y ago
  CI runs on CPUs, Copilot runs on GPUs. Waaaay different. Especially in this age of cryptocurrencies and chip shortages.
az226 4y ago
It’s free for open source maintainers.
- blagie 4y ago
  Open source maintainer here. No, it's not. 100% of what I do is open source. It's used by millions. It's free for maintainers of "major" open source projects. I'm not sure what a "major" open source project is, but it's clearly not what I do. The only way to know if your open source project qualifies is to try to sign up. If it does, you're given a free option.

baby 4y ago

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. "open source is great, except when it's used in a way I don't like"

karl42 4y ago
I don't see the use itself as a problem, but rather that the result is not treated as a derivative work of the input. If I train it on GPL code, the result should be GPL, too.
- natefinch 4y ago
  This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated. Also - there is logic in copilot that checks to make sure it is not suggesting exact duplicates of code from its training set, and if it does, it never sends them to the user.
  - eat_lemons 4y ago
    Read up clean room design and on the IBM bios lawsuits from the 80's and 90's just seeing proprietary code can be a violation Why is it different if we slap a "ml" lable on it
  - hnbad 4y ago
    But Copilot is not a programmer, Copilot is a program. Slapping the "ML" label on a program doesn't magically abdicate its programmers of all responsibility as much as tech companies over the past decade have tried to convince people otherwise.
  - thethirdone 4y ago
    > This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated. I wouldn't put any hard rules on it, but it does seem very fair for programmers who have learned a lot from GPL code to contribute back to GPL projects. I have learned from and used a lot of open source software so whenever possible I try to make projects available to learn from or use.

FinalBriefing 4y ago

Yea...does this mean it will stop working until I pay? It's been really nice for autofilling console logs and boilerplate code...but $10? It's a novelty that is nice when it works, but that's a steep price point for what it is, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

natefinch 4y ago
People in the technical preview get a 60 day free trial, but yes, after that, you'll have to pay.

jstummbillig 4y ago

> has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself Sure it has: Time. In terms of economics it's really simple: Does Copilot free up more than 10$ worth of your time per month? If the product works at all as I understand it (I haven't tried), the answer should be a resounding "yes, and then some" for pretty much any SE, given the current market rates. If the answer is no (for example because it produces too many bad suggestions which break your flow), the product simply doesn't work. There might be other reasons for you not to use it. Ego could be one. Your call. > Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. I don't know why it would feel any more icky than making money off of open source in other ways.

richardfey 4y ago
I could also make a mistake due to Copilot which takes me time to fix, and then I end up spending more time checking code where I previously used it. It has similar pros/cons than copy/pasting
malux85 4y ago
I want to love github co-pilot, but its just not there yet. For trivial stuff it's great, but for anything non-trivial it's always wrong. Always. And my problem is : Time. Cycling through false positives and trying to figure out if it's right costs me way more than $10 a month in productivity. I cant wait for better versions to come out, but right now, no.
plexicle 4y ago
Yeah it's just practicality for me. There is software I pay a lot more for that I use a lot less. $100/year is a steal for the amount of tedious code copilot helps me with on a daily basis.
williamstein 4y ago
It is completely different than using open source programs to make money. Many open source licenses explicitly require any derived work to maintain the copyright notice and a compatible license. If I use github copilot to create a derived work of something somebody else published on GitHub, I have no idea who wrote the upstream code or what license they made it available under. The defense for this is the claim that GitHub copilot doesn’t create a derived work, since the code it produces is very different than anything upstream (this is claimed in the original paper from openai). However, many people have found examples showing this to be a questionable or wishful-thinking claim.

api 4y ago

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. The business model for most of the Internet is to bait people into using things for free and then monetize them without compensation in some roundabout way.

mikesabbagh 4y ago

I already have it in my visual studio code. I do like it. Will it stop working for me now?

password4321 4y ago

> train on open source projects To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely leaving the Copilot user responsible for copyright infringement.

causi 4y ago
Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued. "Hey now, I just hit paste, the software pressed copy by itself" is not going to hold up.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  But if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.
  - causi 4y ago
    Sure, if it's remixed to the point where most people don't go "hey that's Big Bird!" CoPilot doesn't, or at least doesn't always, like when it just copied Quake's fast inverse square code with the verbatim comments including profanity. Using CoPilot to create commercial code opens the coder to significant liability if there's enough money at stake.
    - mnd999 4y ago
      Just argue that you subcontracted that code to Microsoft in good faith for $10/month and pass on the lawsuit to them.
    - 4y ago

tmalsburg2 4y ago

How can it help you to speed up development but not be worth 10$/month. Your hourly rate can’t be that low.

greatpatton 4y ago
It's great when it works, and can also be costly when it doesn't or when you blindly trust it.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  Which is just another way of saying that it doesn’t really work, except perhaps for party tricks.
  - qorrect 4y ago
    For me it works wonderfully, when you choose to use it. If you are just blindingly accepting every suggestion, you're going to have a bad time. You also have to (slightly) change your flow to get the most out of it, which I know is a deal breaker for many. I absolutely love it. It's not going to write good code for you, but for an autocompleter it is amazing.
tmalsburg2 4y ago
The fact that GitHub charge only 10$/month suggests that they themselves don’t believe in their product. Because if it would actually work, i.e. speed up software development by, say, >10%, developers should be happy to pay 10 times as much or more.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  This is a rather silly argument... by that logic since using the Adobe suite saves me at least it has a dozen hours every month I would be happy paying $500 a month for it. There's a limit to what individuals are willing to pay for a subscription service irrespective of how many hours it saves you. Now if we're talking enterprise and bulk licensing then that's a separate issue.

snihalani 4y ago

+1 on ickyness

Spartan-S63 4y ago

Agreed. At the very least, I was hoping they'd bundle it with the GitHub Pro subscription for individuals rather than as a separate product.

hag 4y ago
Totally agree. I was expecting to get this feature as part of my Pro subscription.
- russh 4y ago
  I was expecting the same.

uwuemu 4y ago

Depends on your budget of course, but I don't think it's worth $10/month. I pay just a little bit more than that for an entire IDE. The problem with Copilot is that it's USEFUL for boilerplate code and when you need a lot of copypaste "coding" (think APIs, controllers, etc... basically shifting data around the place), but any time you need to actually code something with some actual algorithmic logic behind it, it's little more than a distraction, and often even a really problematic one, because if you let it, it will happily suggest things that look OK on the surface, but are almost always (and I really mean most of the time) wrong, buggy or otherwise incomplete. You can't realy on it. It's like a kid (I wanted to say a "junior programmer", but it's not anywhere near that level) you can offload some chores to, but you always have to check on it and what it actually does. Fine if all you need is to wash the dishes... more than that and you're asking for trouble. When I'm in the flow, trying to solve some algorithmic problem, I always turn it off because the BS suggestions coming from its little "mind" actually slow me down and mess with my focus. Which all makes sense when you realize what it ultimately is - a philosopher, as opposed to a mathematician.

natefinch 4y ago
I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some library, I'll let it write it for me, and then double check it to make sure it's doing what I want. That's still faster than me going to check the API and writing it all out by hand. Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesting code. I don't mind only having help with the 90%.
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  This seems pretty reasonable to me / resonates w/ how I might use it.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I used copilot yesterday because I wanted a random 10 character long string and was like. Ahh I don’t have the brain power right now to think of this. And remembered I had copilot. So I enabled it. Wrote a comment. And it generated ~10 lines that solved my problem. Tweaked a little bit and rolled with it. It helps solve the boring simple shit so I can focus on the interesting bit.

DustinBrett 4y ago

I went to see the pay URL and it said I was eligible to get it for free. Not sure if that works for some people who contrib to other OSS repo's, but I was about to give up on it when I saw I didn't have to pay, so might be worth checking.

DustinBrett 4y ago
Also, $10/mo is not so bad but I am not in the place right now for more subscriptions. I am in the process of stopping several at the moment.
- deorder 4y ago
  Same here. With prices rising everywhere and a salary of ~40k euros before taxes (which is normal in IT in many EU countries if you don't work for big tech) I hardly have room for another subscription. People here are too quick to say "what is $10 on a $80/hour salary?"

amelius 4y ago

> Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output. How would you feel if they just provided the software without the model, assuming you could train it yourself on open-source code in an instant?

dannytatom 4y ago
I don't know enough about how GTP-3 and ML work to really answer this, but I think I'd be fine with what you're saying if I understand the question. If they provided (and charged) for the infrastructure, but the model was FOSS and community-driven, it would be less icky I think. I just don't like the idea of taking people's work (without asking or checking licenses) and then selling it back to them. It'd be like if Stack Overflow decided to start charging to see answers and not asking or giving a split to the person who gave the answer. I realize they aren't just copy/pasting so not a perfect parallel, but still.

jsharf 4y ago

They still have to pay for servers and maintain the model itself. A neural network isn't just the data -- training and commercializing it (testing, QA, etc) is a lot of work. You wouldn't have an issue with someone making money by using open source software (like a website that is hosted on a server running linux).