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That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the b
by candiddevmike 4y ago
That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.
- neysofu 4y agoWhy should the money go the to code authors in the first place? All training data is available under permissive licenses. Assuming you're not overfitting on specific code sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs fixing), I'd say this is fair play.
- Macha 4y agoUnless something has changed, the training data also includes copyleft code, not just permissively licensed code
- visarga 4y agoRegarding the training of the model - I don't think a copyright can restrict reading, and training is reading, not distributing any original data. About deploying the model - it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original, unattributable code. That can be done by hashing ngrams and a bloom filter. The vast majority of code generated by Codex is original anyway. By the way, Codex is good for many other tasks, like, parsing the fields of a receipt, or extracting the summary of an email, or generating baby names, it's an all purpose NLP tool. Just call it like a function. Code completion is just one thing it does. It talks pretty great English, can compose poems.
- CryZe 4y ago> it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original, unattributable code. That's a setting now.
- mtlynch 4y ago>All training data is available under permissive licenses. Assuming you're not overfitting on specific code sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs fixing), I'd say this is fair play. Copilot isn't honoring the license, so why does it matter whether it was under a restrictive or permissive license?
- nojito 4y agoThe people who designed the model are almost certainly paid by microsoft.
- colejohnson66 4y agoThat's how any business product works. Whenever a company releases a new product, the income doesn't go to the employees; It goes to the company, who will then pay those employees.
- wtetzner 4y agoExcept GitHub isn't paying the authors of the original source code?
- johnfn 4y agoWhat? Should I have to reimburse the author of every tutorial and Stack Overflow post I read on my journey to becoming a software engineer?
- wyager 4y agoThey intentionally opted in to sharing their work with you in a certain way. If someone copy pasted stack overflow answers and made them into a book, which they sold for money, that would be wrong.
- johnfn 4y agoOK... but it's totally possible to use Github repo code as a learning resource too, and I've done this often.
- IshKebab 4y agoPeople do do that. But I think that's a bit different because they add very little extra value. It doesn't take any effort. Why should I give them money? Copilot is different - it clearly takes a lot of skill and effort to turn a bunch of GitHub repos into a fancy autocomplete system.
- flawn 4y agoit's using GPT-3 and, mhm, I guess everyone having proprietary access at GitHub's resources and computing power would be able to get this running.
- ceeplusplus 4y agoThose authors are getting views and imaginary internet points for their work, which is often times more valuable than money to programmer types. It's not like people write SO posts for a salary.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y agoObviously not, but products and people are generally treated differently. Hell, even commercial products and free products are often treated differently.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]