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People could copy-paste code without following licenses before too. It might cause some people to lose faith in license enforcement, it might cause some people
by rsstack 4y ago
People could copy-paste code without following licenses before too.
It might cause some people to lose faith in license enforcement, it might cause some people to lose faith in GitHub, but I don't see a scenario where it "kills" Open Source.
- w4ffl35 4y agoThis is a massive corporation (Microsoft) showing blatant disregard for license which is very different from small scale individual abuse
- rsstack 4y agoThe abuse is mostly academic: What they're doing is _technically_ against copyright law. In practice, someone who wrote a serious JavaScript might have some utility functions "stolen" by Copilot, but it isn't as if it's going to emit forty files of cohesive and well-documented classes. Preact isn't going to suddenly appear in a proprietary codebase of IBM. Maybe their cloneElement function - which is technically copyrighted and licensed, but it isn't why those collaborators decided to spent their time on Open Source.
- w4ffl35 4y agowell, none of us stand to gain from that technicality being violated, only M$ does, and the law does thrive on technicalities.
- rsstack 4y agoThe law thrives on technicalities, Open Source isn't doomed by them. Lawyers might make money from this, Microsoft might make money from this, but Open Source won't die from this.
- w4ffl35 4y agoif this is legal then what prevents us from scraping github, gitlab etc. and making the same product? edit: my guess is github / gitlab etc terms of service would probably prevent this.
- rsstack 4y agoI didn't say legal, but yes: you can build your own product that does that. It is a hard product to build, but yes. Copilot actually has several competitors, some of them have existed for a while, but they have worse marketing than GitHub because everyone knows GitHub :)