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I think we have an ideological disagreement here. I'm not part of the "open source" movement, I believe in free software. Although I'm not prolific, I have auth

I think we have an ideological disagreement here. I'm not part of the "open source" movement, I believe in free software. Although I'm not prolific, I have authored some free software and shared it widely. I want people to have it, use it, and share it, so long as they extend the same rights to their users. Now my software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Had that blob been free, like my software within it, I would have accepted it, but it's not. It's controlled exclusively by Microsoft and OpenAI, two entities which I place no trust in. For me the dog has already bitten. The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product. The "copyright" question for me is not a question of "fairness" or ability of Microsoft or anyone else to make a product. For me it's a tool to protect my contribution from proprietary business. Basically. I dont want the animal safer, I want it free (according to the FSF freedoms).

tempodox 4y ago
> The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product. That's exactly my complaint about Copilot. And since all code hosted on GitHub is now subject to this land-grab, my only recourse is not to use GitHub any more if I want to publish a project of mine.
- Vetch 4y ago
  Code ingestion is not limited to github or copilot. Your best recourse is to make your code publicly inaccessible.
anigbrowl 4y ago
I am not sure your software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Rather, it's been sliced into its constituent parts and those parts have been tagged by the proprietary blob. Your code isn't being run by Copilot, as such; it's been categorized in a way that allows partial retrieval without the license or attribution. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's kind for a ship-of-theseus problem; probably nobody is running any of your programs in their entirety, but it's very possible that bits of your code have found your way into other people's programs. How do you distinguish between contributions that are uniquely yours, and those which are just helper functions or cobbled together from other example code, eg in documentation or from a book or Q&A website?

tempodox 4y ago

> The free software I extended to an audience I believe would show the same generosity has instead been made into a proprietary product. That's exactly my complaint about Copilot. And since all code hosted on GitHub is now subject to this land-grab, my only recourse is not to use GitHub any more if I want to publish a project of mine.

Vetch 4y ago
Code ingestion is not limited to github or copilot. Your best recourse is to make your code publicly inaccessible.

anigbrowl 4y ago

I am not sure your software has been assimilated into a proprietary blob. Rather, it's been sliced into its constituent parts and those parts have been tagged by the proprietary blob. Your code isn't being run by Copilot, as such; it's been categorized in a way that allows partial retrieval without the license or attribution. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's kind for a ship-of-theseus problem; probably nobody is running any of your programs in their entirety, but it's very possible that bits of your code have found your way into other people's programs. How do you distinguish between contributions that are uniquely yours, and those which are just helper functions or cobbled together from other example code, eg in documentation or from a book or Q&A website?