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Nobody is laundering away proprietary livenses, because that code is not open source and not in public github repos. And OSS capabilities are now present in cop

Nobody is laundering away proprietary livenses, because that code is not open source and not in public github repos. And OSS capabilities are now present in copilot, which is neither free nor open. Furthermore these contributions are making their way into proprietary code and the OSS licensing becomes even further watered down. This is the epitome of what copyleft is against!

TheCoelacanth 4y ago
Code published on Github is not necessarily open source. There is a lot of code there that has no particular license attached, which means that all rights are reserved except for those covered in the Github TOS, which I believe just covers viewing the code on Github.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Copilot includes all public repos on GitBub, so this includes source-available and Proprietary code too.
yjk 4y ago
Indeed, the ability to 'launder away' proprietary licenses when source is available means that companies in the future (that would otherwise provide source under a non-permissive license) will shift in favour of not providing source code at all.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
I'm not sure this is true. Proprietary source code gets leaked and that can be used to train a NN. I find it likely that Copilot was trained against at least one non-OSS code base hosted on GitHub. Second, if copyright is being laundered away we can get increasingly clever with how we liberate proprietary software. Today, decompiling and reverse engineering is a labor intensive process. That's the whole point of "open source" - that working in source is easier than working in bytecode. Given the hockey-stick of innovation happening in AI right now, I'd be surprised if we don't see AI assisted disassembly happening in the next decade. If you can go from bytecode to source code, that unlocks a lot. Even more so if you can go from bytecode to source code and feed that into a NN to liberate the code from its original license.
blackbrokkoli 4y ago
I follow you explanation but not your end statement. What I think GP is getting at in my understanding is that all this OSS/licensing stuff was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free. Now we have a fat cooperation making a public statement of putting the value of advancing humanity over the value of honoring weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property" - which is what we are always tried to do, no? Not that there is nothing to criticize, but I think that's a good thing on the whole.
- simoncion 4y ago
  > [OSS] was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free. Information may want to be free, but users of free information often want to enrich their private endeavors by shackling the information that was given to them freely. The (A|L)GPL acknowledges the fact that some people and corporations like to use free-and-gratis work in their products and not reciprocate the courtesy shown to them by the authors of that work. (I choose the (L)GPL whenever I can so that folks who derive from my work are either required to either make it available as I have, or pay me enough so that I don't mind them shackling my work.) The BSD license acknowledges the fact that some people and many corporations like to use gratis work in their closed-source products and never even do so much as bother to credit the authors of work that they used. For as long as powerful folks continue to use and improve upon gratis information and software without contributing the products that used that information and/or improvements, the 'weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property"' are going to have to continue to be dealt with. Remember... you likely cannot reasonably afford an army of lawyers to ensure that pretty much noone uses your work without paying you, but big companies like Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, Oracle, etc, etc, and wealthy individuals can. For as long as those wealthy entities can lock up and force you to pay for their work and ideas, but make it ruinously expensive for us little people to -individually- do the same to them, we'll need "weird old Victorian" things like licenses to help correct this imbalance of power.

TheCoelacanth 4y ago

Code published on Github is not necessarily open source. There is a lot of code there that has no particular license attached, which means that all rights are reserved except for those covered in the Github TOS, which I believe just covers viewing the code on Github.

jacooper 4y ago
Copilot includes all public repos on GitBub, so this includes source-available and Proprietary code too.

yjk 4y ago

Indeed, the ability to 'launder away' proprietary licenses when source is available means that companies in the future (that would otherwise provide source under a non-permissive license) will shift in favour of not providing source code at all.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

I'm not sure this is true. Proprietary source code gets leaked and that can be used to train a NN. I find it likely that Copilot was trained against at least one non-OSS code base hosted on GitHub. Second, if copyright is being laundered away we can get increasingly clever with how we liberate proprietary software. Today, decompiling and reverse engineering is a labor intensive process. That's the whole point of "open source" - that working in source is easier than working in bytecode. Given the hockey-stick of innovation happening in AI right now, I'd be surprised if we don't see AI assisted disassembly happening in the next decade. If you can go from bytecode to source code, that unlocks a lot. Even more so if you can go from bytecode to source code and feed that into a NN to liberate the code from its original license.

blackbrokkoli 4y ago

I follow you explanation but not your end statement. What I think GP is getting at in my understanding is that all this OSS/licensing stuff was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free. Now we have a fat cooperation making a public statement of putting the value of advancing humanity over the value of honoring weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property" - which is what we are always tried to do, no? Not that there is nothing to criticize, but I think that's a good thing on the whole.

simoncion 4y ago
> [OSS] was a cautious attempt to assert a radical idea into an atmosphere of extrem secrecy: That information wants to be free. Information may want to be free, but users of free information often want to enrich their private endeavors by shackling the information that was given to them freely. The (A|L)GPL acknowledges the fact that some people and corporations like to use free-and-gratis work in their products and not reciprocate the courtesy shown to them by the authors of that work. (I choose the (L)GPL whenever I can so that folks who derive from my work are either required to either make it available as I have, or pay me enough so that I don't mind them shackling my work.) The BSD license acknowledges the fact that some people and many corporations like to use gratis work in their closed-source products and never even do so much as bother to credit the authors of work that they used. For as long as powerful folks continue to use and improve upon gratis information and software without contributing the products that used that information and/or improvements, the 'weird old Victorian ideas of "intellectual property"' are going to have to continue to be dealt with. Remember... you likely cannot reasonably afford an army of lawyers to ensure that pretty much noone uses your work without paying you, but big companies like Microsoft, RedHat, IBM, Oracle, etc, etc, and wealthy individuals can. For as long as those wealthy entities can lock up and force you to pay for their work and ideas, but make it ruinously expensive for us little people to -individually- do the same to them, we'll need "weird old Victorian" things like licenses to help correct this imbalance of power.