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While the moral and legal discussions here are interesting and worth exploring, I find this text hyperbolic. Its premise is that the main way that people curren

While the moral and legal discussions here are interesting and worth exploring, I find this text hyperbolic. Its premise is that the main way that people currently interact with open-source projects is by digging into their source code, copy-pasting away a snippet of code that solves a particular problem, and then of course giving the authors the required attribution. This is far from the truth. The main usage of most open-source projects isn't as code, but as a product. The median user of an open-source project wants to think about the project as little as possible. They want to be as unaware as possible of the code that makes up the project. They're happy to add the project to their `requirements.txt`, add a few lines to import and use it and then never think about it again.

Sydneyco 4y ago
I agree with that. Also, if we agree that GitHub copilot enables you to be more productive as a developer. Can we argue that it could help open-source communities by helping them finish projects faster?
alexchantavy 4y ago
I haven’t used Copilot but do its samples give links on where it was from? If so, that seems to be a sufficient funnel back to the OSS repo itself without the community harming aspects mentioned in the article.
- cool-RR 4y ago
  They don't. It would be a profoundly difficult problem to find the right links for each suggestion.
- freeqaz 4y ago
  Not at all. There isn't even a way to get the "source" if you wanted.
- thamer 4y ago
  It doesn't, because that's not how it works. Copilot doesn't recognize what you're trying to do and then paste a code sample from a repo it has in its index. Just like DALL·E 2 doesn't produce images that say "I picked these pixels from this image and this part from this other one and these colors from this third one". When a model is trained, it's effectively a set of hundreds of millions of numbers that when combined in just the right way can produce a specific output. In my experience the vast majority of the time Copilot doesn't write code that already exists. It actually uses the variables you declared, the functions that already exist in your code base, etc. It's not an index of best matches from GitHub for what you're trying to do.
pmontra 4y ago
I came to write the same comment as cool-RR. I'm not sure I ever copied a code block from an open source project. I copied plenty of code blocks from gits, stackoverflow and blogs. Those are the media that could be starved off by a massive use of Copilot. There could be a problem for open source projects (and closed source ones as well) if Copilot could autocomplete with code from private repositories. I can't remember if it looks at them too.
remram 4y ago
The whole point of open-source is about re-using and modifying the source though. Sure it allows using the product, but that's hardly the defining factor of open-source.
- mkr-hn 4y ago
  The point is access to the source. If that access is mediated through a system that doesn't tell you where the code comes from or how it's licensed, it's failing at open source. It's not like they don't get it. Even Microsoft will provide the source of its products under certain circumstances for this exact reason. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

Sydneyco 4y ago

I agree with that. Also, if we agree that GitHub copilot enables you to be more productive as a developer. Can we argue that it could help open-source communities by helping them finish projects faster?

alexchantavy 4y ago

I haven’t used Copilot but do its samples give links on where it was from? If so, that seems to be a sufficient funnel back to the OSS repo itself without the community harming aspects mentioned in the article.

cool-RR 4y ago
They don't. It would be a profoundly difficult problem to find the right links for each suggestion.
freeqaz 4y ago
Not at all. There isn't even a way to get the "source" if you wanted.
thamer 4y ago
It doesn't, because that's not how it works. Copilot doesn't recognize what you're trying to do and then paste a code sample from a repo it has in its index. Just like DALL·E 2 doesn't produce images that say "I picked these pixels from this image and this part from this other one and these colors from this third one". When a model is trained, it's effectively a set of hundreds of millions of numbers that when combined in just the right way can produce a specific output. In my experience the vast majority of the time Copilot doesn't write code that already exists. It actually uses the variables you declared, the functions that already exist in your code base, etc. It's not an index of best matches from GitHub for what you're trying to do.

pmontra 4y ago

I came to write the same comment as cool-RR. I'm not sure I ever copied a code block from an open source project. I copied plenty of code blocks from gits, stackoverflow and blogs. Those are the media that could be starved off by a massive use of Copilot. There could be a problem for open source projects (and closed source ones as well) if Copilot could autocomplete with code from private repositories. I can't remember if it looks at them too.

remram 4y ago

The whole point of open-source is about re-using and modifying the source though. Sure it allows using the product, but that's hardly the defining factor of open-source.

mkr-hn 4y ago
The point is access to the source. If that access is mediated through a system that doesn't tell you where the code comes from or how it's licensed, it's failing at open source. It's not like they don't get it. Even Microsoft will provide the source of its products under certain circumstances for this exact reason. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/