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> At this point, Copilot strikes me as a tool that replaces googling for stack overflow answers. I've never seen anyone put a license on code they post on stac

> At this point, Copilot strikes me as a tool that replaces googling for stack overflow answers. I've never seen anyone put a license on code they post on stack overflow, so I imagine you agree to release code in your answers under a permissive license (MIT, e.g.) when signing up on stack overflow. On github however, it's common to put a "LICENSE" file in a repository. Github even automatically shows you what license it is when its content is a known, widely used license. They do that automatically. But somehow, with all their fancy AI magic, it's too hard for github's employees to use the same automated licensing code to decide whether or not they should share licensed code. They could also slap on a comment saying: "WARNING: this code is licensed under the <license name> license." They could even expand that, saying: "Your repository has the <license name> license, so in order to use this code you'd have to change your license." Github could fix this issue with a hash-map and an if-statement. By not doing so they're willfully letting people commit copyright infringement, and disrespecting everyones intelligence in the process.

glandium 4y ago
Ironically, everything on SA is in a version of CC-BY-SA https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing and compatibility with most licenses is doubtful, but I don't think most people care when they copy/paste from there. Not even considering license compatibility, how many people follow its attribution clause?
im3w1l 4y ago
https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing > Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. > Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. > Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0. Basically it says you may share the code and you may use it for any purpose, but you must give attribution and you must license your derived work under the same license. If you don't do those things then you are basically relying on some kind of fair use or "this is too trivial to be copyrightable". But yeah, there really is a license.

glandium 4y ago

Ironically, everything on SA is in a version of CC-BY-SA https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing and compatibility with most licenses is doubtful, but I don't think most people care when they copy/paste from there. Not even considering license compatibility, how many people follow its attribution clause?

im3w1l 4y ago

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing > Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. > Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. > Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0. Basically it says you may share the code and you may use it for any purpose, but you must give attribution and you must license your derived work under the same license. If you don't do those things then you are basically relying on some kind of fair use or "this is too trivial to be copyrightable". But yeah, there really is a license.