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If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would y

by spupe 4y ago

If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?

XCabbage 4y ago
People I've worked with have different philosophies on this, but personally, if you check in code that is distinctive enough that I can identify the source you copied and pasted it from, and you provided no indication (whether in a comment or a PR description) that you copied it, I will really get quite grumpy at you about it. Way too often I burn half an hour needlessly during review in one of two ways: * trying to figure out how the heck someone figured out some "magic" code that achieves something by invoking a bunch of poorly documented library or framework internals, and trying to reverse engineer WTF all the magic does by diving into the framework's source... only to eventually think to google the whole snippet rather than each individual method call, and discover it's copied from a Stack Overflow answer * trying to figure out why something was written in an unidiomatic or overcomplicated way rather than a more obvious approach, and commenting at length on how I'd simplify it... only to eventually realise it was copied from a Stack Overflow answer Attribution isn't just about making sure the right person gets credit, or about license compliance; reviewers and maintainers frequently need to be able to see where stuff was copied and pasted from in order to do their jobs effectively, even for snippets of just a few lines.
- spupe 4y ago
  I understand where you are coming from. However, I think you are making the assumption that this person simply copy/pasted some code with no understanding of it, or that this code is then very different from your codebase and needs to be refactored. If using Stack Overflow did not add to your overall development time but subtracted from it, because it was used as an appropriate piece of a much bigger puzzle - a far more realistic scenario for both Copilot and our general use of SO -, then I see no issue with it whatsoever. Certainly no moral or copyright issues as this person on Twitter implies.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    No copyright issues in the sense that no entity is likely to ever pursue the matter, sure. But copying and commercially using someone else's nontrivial bit of code that doesn't have a license that says you can is quite blatantly a copyright violation.
ben-schaaf 4y ago
If I found out a junior dev had been copying copy-left or proprietary code then I'd have to rip out that code, have a chat with them and figure out what to do from there. Even if the code isn't copy-left it's still someone else's code, sometimes that's ok but sometimes it's definitely not.
whatatita 4y ago
If the solution was made up of ideas from OSS and snippets from Stack Overflow? No; that's fine. If the solution was copied from an OSS project without proper attribution? Yes. Absolutely. And they'd have words with a senior dev and maybe even legal if the code they copied made its way into production without attribution. Many copyleft OSS licenses require attribution and distribution of derivative works that we wouldn't allow.
mbreese 4y ago
It depends on the source of that code and the expected license of the code you paid them for. If everything is MIT/BSD (and attributed), no problem. If the code was GPL and I’m making a commercial product, we have an issue. I’d also expect for any stack overflow code to include a comment with a link to the stack overflow page. I think one of the key points is to make sure any code taken from another source is cited appropriately. If it isn’t, or the junior dev is passing it off as their own work, then we have problems.
thelastbender12 4y ago
This is a good thought exercise. I wouldn't call it stealing, though I am not sure how legal liability is assessed, say if they picked up GPL code unknown to the company, and the company is later sued over it. This isn't derived from principled reasoning, but I think of it as similar to community norms. Not the best example, but you wouldn't mind someone subletting their homes to Airbnb, but if all of your apartment complex does it, it invites regulation. A product like copilot enables copying code (even if inspired, and not verbatim) at a scale that individual developers can't. So respecting software licenses needs to be codified (legally?) while previously it was left unmonitored.
trention 4y ago
It's absolutely fine to allow humans to do that while prohibiting (commercialized) AI to do the same thing.
- spupe 4y ago
  I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?
  - jhugo 4y ago
    Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect? We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained. I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an average human at these things, and thus we can't just blindly assume it is conceptualising rather than copying. Copilot regularly produces verbatim copies of existing code when working on non-trivial things. Forget about the "AI" label: Copilot is just a complex computer program, that takes code from other people and inserts various permutations of it into your editor, whilst ignoring the license of that code.
    - spupe 4y ago
      I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so. My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on your own, and you use only enough that it is clearly fair use), then I think an AI should be able to assist in that task. There is no need to complicate things by legislating what the AI is doing and what Google is doing, as they are very similar things and in fact even use similar methods.
      - 4y ago
jhugo 4y ago
No matter how complex a program is, and no matter whether it uses techniques sometimes described as "AI" in its implementation, it's not a person. Copilot is just a very complex pipeline from other people's code to your editor, which ignores the license of those other people's code.
genezeta 4y ago
About 10 years ago or so, I was working at a certain place. They put me into a small team apparently focused on some R+D project under the direction of an "architect". Basically, the project was to package Cordova + Backbone + Marionette, plus a couple of tools, under their own commercial name. Then they'd go around potential clients presenting it as the perfect solution to build hybrid applications for web/mobile/smartTV/whatever. A certain Monday, the "architect" arrived boasting. He did that often, but this time he was more boastful. He explained that he had spent the whole weekend coding. He had written an incredible tool that would create a skeleton for a project from zero. You would type something like `tool create` and it would create the whole project with all the scripts and some example views and whatnot. It was Yeoman's yo CLI tool, of course. He had just changed the copyright in the comments, removed most of the comments, he had deleted any mention to yeoman or the original creators, changed the name of the executable script and that's it. The whole thing was OS code picked up from various repos and packaged as their own. The company used it to sell development projects. The so-called-architect used it to sell himself inside the company and then jump away into a startup as CTO. Is this common or is it just anecdata? I don't know. It's clearly not the only time I've seen something like this and I do know that in certain companies around here it isn't exactly uncommon. But I can't say how common or uncommon it is. Would I call this "selling other people's code"? Yes, I would.
- spupe 4y ago
  This is clear-cut fraud, but it is also not even close to what Copilot or most junior devs are doing.

by spupe 4y ago

XCabbage 4y ago

People I've worked with have different philosophies on this, but personally, if you check in code that is distinctive enough that I can identify the source you copied and pasted it from, and you provided no indication (whether in a comment or a PR description) that you copied it, I will really get quite grumpy at you about it. Way too often I burn half an hour needlessly during review in one of two ways: * trying to figure out how the heck someone figured out some "magic" code that achieves something by invoking a bunch of poorly documented library or framework internals, and trying to reverse engineer WTF all the magic does by diving into the framework's source... only to eventually think to google the whole snippet rather than each individual method call, and discover it's copied from a Stack Overflow answer * trying to figure out why something was written in an unidiomatic or overcomplicated way rather than a more obvious approach, and commenting at length on how I'd simplify it... only to eventually realise it was copied from a Stack Overflow answer Attribution isn't just about making sure the right person gets credit, or about license compliance; reviewers and maintainers frequently need to be able to see where stuff was copied and pasted from in order to do their jobs effectively, even for snippets of just a few lines.

spupe 4y ago
I understand where you are coming from. However, I think you are making the assumption that this person simply copy/pasted some code with no understanding of it, or that this code is then very different from your codebase and needs to be refactored. If using Stack Overflow did not add to your overall development time but subtracted from it, because it was used as an appropriate piece of a much bigger puzzle - a far more realistic scenario for both Copilot and our general use of SO -, then I see no issue with it whatsoever. Certainly no moral or copyright issues as this person on Twitter implies.
- thfuran 4y ago
  No copyright issues in the sense that no entity is likely to ever pursue the matter, sure. But copying and commercially using someone else's nontrivial bit of code that doesn't have a license that says you can is quite blatantly a copyright violation.

ben-schaaf 4y ago

If I found out a junior dev had been copying copy-left or proprietary code then I'd have to rip out that code, have a chat with them and figure out what to do from there. Even if the code isn't copy-left it's still someone else's code, sometimes that's ok but sometimes it's definitely not.

whatatita 4y ago

If the solution was made up of ideas from OSS and snippets from Stack Overflow? No; that's fine. If the solution was copied from an OSS project without proper attribution? Yes. Absolutely. And they'd have words with a senior dev and maybe even legal if the code they copied made its way into production without attribution. Many copyleft OSS licenses require attribution and distribution of derivative works that we wouldn't allow.

mbreese 4y ago

It depends on the source of that code and the expected license of the code you paid them for. If everything is MIT/BSD (and attributed), no problem. If the code was GPL and I’m making a commercial product, we have an issue. I’d also expect for any stack overflow code to include a comment with a link to the stack overflow page. I think one of the key points is to make sure any code taken from another source is cited appropriately. If it isn’t, or the junior dev is passing it off as their own work, then we have problems.

thelastbender12 4y ago

This is a good thought exercise. I wouldn't call it stealing, though I am not sure how legal liability is assessed, say if they picked up GPL code unknown to the company, and the company is later sued over it. This isn't derived from principled reasoning, but I think of it as similar to community norms. Not the best example, but you wouldn't mind someone subletting their homes to Airbnb, but if all of your apartment complex does it, it invites regulation. A product like copilot enables copying code (even if inspired, and not verbatim) at a scale that individual developers can't. So respecting software licenses needs to be codified (legally?) while previously it was left unmonitored.

trention 4y ago

It's absolutely fine to allow humans to do that while prohibiting (commercialized) AI to do the same thing.

spupe 4y ago
I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?
- jhugo 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect? We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained. I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an average human at these things, and thus we can't just blindly assume it is conceptualising rather than copying. Copilot regularly produces verbatim copies of existing code when working on non-trivial things. Forget about the "AI" label: Copilot is just a complex computer program, that takes code from other people and inserts various permutations of it into your editor, whilst ignoring the license of that code.
  - spupe 4y ago
    I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so. My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on your own, and you use only enough that it is clearly fair use), then I think an AI should be able to assist in that task. There is no need to complicate things by legislating what the AI is doing and what Google is doing, as they are very similar things and in fact even use similar methods.
    - 4y ago

jhugo 4y ago

No matter how complex a program is, and no matter whether it uses techniques sometimes described as "AI" in its implementation, it's not a person. Copilot is just a very complex pipeline from other people's code to your editor, which ignores the license of those other people's code.

genezeta 4y ago

About 10 years ago or so, I was working at a certain place. They put me into a small team apparently focused on some R+D project under the direction of an "architect". Basically, the project was to package Cordova + Backbone + Marionette, plus a couple of tools, under their own commercial name. Then they'd go around potential clients presenting it as the perfect solution to build hybrid applications for web/mobile/smartTV/whatever. A certain Monday, the "architect" arrived boasting. He did that often, but this time he was more boastful. He explained that he had spent the whole weekend coding. He had written an incredible tool that would create a skeleton for a project from zero. You would type something like `tool create` and it would create the whole project with all the scripts and some example views and whatnot. It was Yeoman's yo CLI tool, of course. He had just changed the copyright in the comments, removed most of the comments, he had deleted any mention to yeoman or the original creators, changed the name of the executable script and that's it. The whole thing was OS code picked up from various repos and packaged as their own. The company used it to sell development projects. The so-called-architect used it to sell himself inside the company and then jump away into a startup as CTO. Is this common or is it just anecdata? I don't know. It's clearly not the only time I've seen something like this and I do know that in certain companies around here it isn't exactly uncommon. But I can't say how common or uncommon it is. Would I call this "selling other people's code"? Yes, I would.

spupe 4y ago
This is clear-cut fraud, but it is also not even close to what Copilot or most junior devs are doing.