3 ms·
I feel "stealing your community" is lawyer hyperbole, but people also seem ok with what MS is doing with copilot, and I am not. If you think what copilot is do
by olliej 4y ago
I feel "stealing your community" is lawyer hyperbole, but people also seem ok with what MS is doing with copilot, and I am not.
If you think what copilot is doing is ok, and there is nothing wrong with it, I'd love it if you could go through this small thought exercise, and see if it impacts your view at all:
Say you write a bunch of code, and release it under GPL. For the sake of argument imagine it is something complicated that you care about.
Now say another person is trying to do what your code does, and they find your code, a say "excellent". They then copy and paste it into their project, and release their code under a BSD license instead.
Would you consider this theft of your IP? The law certainly would, and I think most devs would as well.
What would you say if they instead release "their" code as public domain?
Now we'll go a bit further. Another person is trying to solve this problem in some commercial software. They find your code, copy-paste it into their project, then sell their software and don't release the source, or even acknowledge you.
Would you consider _this_ theft? again the law would.
Now, what if instead they found your code through the invalid BSD relicense? or the invalid public domain one?
To me every one of these would be theft, and every one would be required to required to release the source of projects that made use of my GPL'd code, under the GPL. That is literally the whole point of the GPL.
But let's imagine a different route.
A person is writing some code and can't work out how to solve a problem, so they ask on StackOverflow. Now another person comes along and answer the question by copy-pasting from your project into SO. The first person says "yay!" and then copies that code, and we repeat the above scenarios.
In an even more extreme case, imagine both of the above people work at the same large company - so neither knows or is even aware of the other - how does this impact what is going on? It's two people, but fundamentally the company is copying the original GPL code into SO, then copying it from SO into its proprietary code.
I get that MS and GitHub try to position it as if copilot is "creating code", but it is simply doing a statistical code completion that is demonstrably happy to copy and paste from the original source into the recipient code. To my mind all it is doing is providing a mechanism to launder GPL (or whatever) code into your own without the license, by slapping "ML" and "AI" on the process and requiring more than 3 keys to be involved.
- thorncorona 4y ago> Another person is trying to solve this problem in some commercial software. They find your code, copy-paste it into their project, then sell their software and don't release the source, or even acknowledge you. Let's be honest, copy-and-pasting happens all the time. In software, in engineering, in marketing, in everything. Whether people acknowledge it or not. Everyone looks at Stack Overflow all the time. You do it. I do it. Nobody reads the licensing terms. We all produce software with reskinned and taped together functions. A collage is still unique, creative, work despite being glued together with other people's art. Most songwriters will write a song with a part like someone else's song. The products you buy at a store are rip-offs of someone else's product. Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants before them. Such is learning, such is life. Get over it.
- olliej 4y ago> Let's be honest, copy-and-pasting happens all the time. In software, in engineering, in marketing, in everything If I copied code without the rights to it into code I have written at any company I would absolutely be fired. It would not be up for debate. > Everyone looks at Stack Overflow all the time. You do it. I do it. I don't - it is very infrequently that I would look at SO answers > Nobody reads the licensing terms. Yes, they absolutely do, because again OSS or the GPL is meaningless if people are ignoring the license. More over I would suggest you talk to your employer's legal and IP departments to let them know you're copying code you don't have rights to into their product. > We all produce software with reskinned and taped together functions. A collage is still unique, creative, work despite being glued together with other people's art. Wow. Absolutely not. Competent engineers know how to write code themselves, they aren't copy-pasting their way to a solution. That's why you get paid a lot - if I was happy with copy pasta solutions I would hire a bunch of badly performing uni students. > Most songwriters will write a song with a part like someone else's song. If two people write similar songs that does not mean one copied the other. If one person copies part of another person's song they will end up in court, and they will lose all the revenue from the entire work. > The products you buy at a store are rip-offs of someone else's product. The ripoffs that stay on the market are not made by copying the entire implementation. > Everybody stands on the shoulders of giants before them. Such is learning, such is life. I didn't say anything at all to imply that we didn't. What I said was you don't get to just copy other people's work and pass it off as your own. > Get over it. Just because you apparently can't actually write new code yourself doesn't mean that that applies to other people. Also, you should really get your employer to tell you whether your proposal of ignoring copyright is ok. What you are saying is that if I google some problem, and copy some code from, say, gecko, or linux, or gcc, etc into my proprietary closed source product, that perfectly ok and those silly open source people should keep it to themselves if they don't want me doing so. But there's also a difference between "I searched for this and copied the code I found" and "I typed some letters