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I really like it too but I can't help but feel like all the same people panicked about Microsoft acquiring GitHub are suddenly quiet about the fact that Microso
by culi 4y ago
I really like it too but I can't help but feel like all the same people panicked about Microsoft acquiring GitHub are suddenly quiet about the fact that Microsoft has found the ultimate way to profit off of open-source
There's a ton of developer effort that went into Copilot and those devs should be paid fairly. But the majority of what fuels Copilot is the millions of lines of open source code submitted every day.
I think I'd feel a lot better about it if they committed a good chunk of that money back into the same open source communities they depend on. Otherwise its a parasitic (or at least not fully consensual) relationship
- uluyol 4y agoMicrosoft could simply crawl archives of code wherever they exist, and use that to build copilot. GitHub hosting open source communities is a way of giving back.
- culi 4y agoMicrosoft gives free copies of Office to schools. Why do you think it does that? MS benefits from people being locked into its service and suite. It provides premium subscriptions for additional features. Hosting code "for free" is part of its business model. It's not a way of "giving back"
- lolinder 4y agoTheir point is that they didn't need to own GitHub to build copilot—they could have used the public code regardless.
- jjluoma 4y agoMaybe they have a stronger position because they own GitHub. There is at least "Release and Indemnification" section in the terms of service.
- croes 4y agoIt's a lot more complicated to crawl code somewhere in the web than to crawl github. They could even change github so it benefits their code crawling.
- buildbot 4y agoThat would be a problem if Microsoft didn’t also have their own Bing
- usr1106 4y agoOh, is Bing still a thing? Honest question, haven't heard it mentioned for years. Went from Altavista to Google (I believe, it's a long time ago...) and now to DDG a couple of years ago. Never considered Bing directly although I believe DDG results come or came from Bing.
- aembleton 4y agoYes, Bing still exists. Like you say, that's where a lot of DDG results come from.
- Aeolun 4y ago> It's not a way of "giving back" Github Advanced Security costs me $200+/month, but if I make my repository public, I get all of that for free. Certainly feels like a way of giving back. Of course it benefits them too, but it doesn’t have to be purely altruistic to be a net positive.
- throwoutway 4y agoCould have. But they didn’t
- rmbyrro 4y agoThey're providing Copilot for free for OSS maintainers.
- blagie 4y agoOSS maintainer here. No. They're not. They're advertising that they are. They are providing it to a very small set of high-profile OSS maintainers some opaque algorithm picked out. Having high-profile adopters is just good business.
- jlpqu 4y agoExactly. They are bribing the project leads so they can then say that scanning is approved and voluntary.
- rmbyrro 4y agoDidn't OSS maintainers already voluntarily approved such uses when they published their work under an OSS license? One fundamental aspect of being open source is not limiting the purposes of use. If we now say that "code-generation AI training" is not allowed without prior approval (in addition to the license itself), then it's not open source anymore...
- blagie 4y agoI approved some of my code for being reused under the terms of the AGPL. Co-pilot is very welcome to scan it and generate derivative AGPL code. If I write AGPL code, and co-pilot scans it and makes a very similar program to it for a FAANG, who then proceeds to compete with my open-source tool by using the creative ideas generated there-in, but with a proprietary tool, that's not very fair. That's why I chose the license I did. FAANG is more than welcome (indeed, encouraged) to use my code for any purpose permitted under the license. That includes everything except making it proprietary. I've tried running copilot with the starting lines of my code. It generated code with identical creative ideas. It was the equivalent of taking Star Trek, and generating a new movie with the same plot line, but with names changed. That's not legal. My code was specific enough that this wasn't just chance or other similar code. I work in a pretty narrow domain. I did use copilot for coding myself, and a lot of what it generated was unique. But it is also a good paraphrasing tool. Running a movie script backwards and forwards through Google Translate to get different phrasing, and then swapping out new names, does not a new movie make. Ditto here.