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> The crux of the issue, and a bone of contention in the software development sphere since its debut last year, is that Copilot is a proprietary service built o
by yladiz 4y ago
> The crux of the issue, and a bone of contention in the software development sphere since its debut last year, is that Copilot is a proprietary service built on top of the hard work of the open source community.
I don't understand this argument, because you could use the same one for basically any SaaS product that uses open source code.
However, this quote is more convincing:
> “Open source” doesn’t mean a complete free-for-all, and there are still license requirements to fulfil and attributions to include, so if Copilot “borrows” code from one project and suggests it to the author of another project, will this open the floodgates to copyright infringement lawsuits?
The "copyright infringement lawsuits" point aside, which I don't think applies to license issues, I think this raises a good point. Will it tell you which attributions to give, and will it respect licenses that require you to distribute code you make if you use that code (e.g. GPL), maybe by either warning you or allowing you to filter out code from those kinds of repositories?
- jpeizer 4y agoI am talking out of my bum here, but I think it’s a good guess. Normally when you sign up to you a service you are also giving that service provider access to your work. If that is the case here this access would exist outside of the license listed on any given GitHub repo as a separate agreement from the general public.
- sreevisakh 4y agoSpecifically, section D.4 [1] of Github's terms of service. That agreement gives them the right to parse or analyze source code. Sounds very much like it justifies training copilot. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...