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I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that mat

I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. Some Open Source licenses can be used in proprietary code, (MIT, BSD etc) with little more than simple attribution. Those developers chose that license for a reason, and I've got no problem with commercial entities using that code. There is a valid argument to be made about the training of models on GPL code. (Argument in the sense that there's two sides to the coin.) On the one hand we happily train humans on GPL code. Those humans can then write their own functions,but for trivial functions they're gonna look a lot like GPL Source. If the AI is regurgitating GPL code as-is, then that's a problem- not dissimilar to a student or employee regurgitating the same code. But this argument is about Free software licenses,not really (most?) Open Source licenses. Either way OSS/Free is not about "giving back",its about giving forward. In the specific case here of co-pilot making money,I'd say A) you're allowed to make money from Free/OSS code. B) no one is forcing you to use this feature.

japhyr 4y ago
No need to hate on you for a valid response. I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime. Licenses were written for humans working with code. We can talk about corporations as well, but when I've thought about corporations in the past, I thought about people working on code at corporations. The idea of an AI using my open source project to generate working code for someone or some corporation feels...different. Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. But feelings are worth talking about, especially as we're all finding the boundaries of new tools and new ways of working. I don't agree with everything in the post, but I think this is a great conversation to be having.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I agree that AI usage of code is somewhat murky with current licenses,which obviously don't mention it either way. Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it." GPL code can be used by the military to develop nuclear weapons. Given that the is a guiding principle of the FSF its hard to argue that the current usage is not OK.
  - eulenteufel 4y ago
    I have no problem with Copilot being trained on AGPL code and the getting released with a AGPL compatible license. Free to do whatever they want with it. The problem is Copilot training on source code and then discarding any restrictions of the licenses. Maybe it is legal right now but I'm sure this case will find it's way into open source licenses pretty soon.
    - hikawaii 4y ago
      Do we know if CoPilot X was trained on AGPL, not just GPL? Additionally I'm not sure if AGPL does anything. I suspect the ethics and such of licensing when large fractions of work are training AI and using AI need to be worked out rather than getting mad at any individual. What does copy left look like for AI?
      - zelphirkalt 4y ago
        There is indeed a problem of transparency right now. Companies afaik did not release the complete training data set. Might even be intentionally, because they do not want to risk, that they trained it on stuff they should not have had, without building in license and attribution into the output of their models. Or it might be, that they know that to be a fact. I can only hope, that lawmakers hurry to catch up with reality and impose transparency obligations for AI models.
    - zelphirkalt 4y ago
slg 4y ago
If we are being honest as a community, open source developer are pretty far down the list of groups with valid grievances against this current wave of AI for how they are trained. There is at least a debatable case that these systems are operating in the spirit if not the exact letter of general open source licenses. It is a much harder argument to make for the AI trained on writing and art that is clearly copyrighted. If you have ethical questions about Copilot, you really should be against this entire crop of AI systems.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  So you're suggesting that developers shut up and let the artists talk first? I'm not sure what the "you're suffering less than these other people" thing is actually intended to translate into? What do we do with that? All software licences are based on copyright, same as writing, art, music, etc. Some software licences are permissive. Some writing is permissive (e.g. Cory Doctorow). Some music is permissive (e.g. Amanda Palmer). It entirely depends on what the author wants. The fact that more software is permissive is a good thing, right? I entirely agree that there are ethical problems with training AI on copyrighted training data. But please let's not start gatekeeping this. We need to have a serious discussion as a culture about it, and saying "you're way down the list of victims" isn't helping.
  - slg 4y ago
    > So you're suggesting that developers shut up and let the artists talk first? I'm not sure what the "you're suffering less than these other people" thing is actually intended to translate into? What do we do with that? The tech community has a tendency to not care about issues like this until it effects us. I’m not telling people to shut up about this. I’m saying don’t be a hypocrite. If this is the wrong approach for GitHub, it is a problem with the way all these AI are trained.
    - _cenw 4y ago
      This is a pattern of argument I see all the time in minority communities, and it really irks me the wrong way. You are allowed to care about the things you care about and not have a concrete well-informed opinion on something related that might be more pressing. It only becomes hypocricy as soon as you actively dismiss the other thing as if you were well-informed. And I don't see anyone here doing that.
rob74 4y ago
You're allowed to make money from Free/OSS code, and plenty of companies have (Google, Amazon etc.), but they have always also at least given back something to the community to earn some good will. The situation with AI is new because it not only doesn't give anything back, it actually takes something away by threatening developers' jobs etc.
- dolmen 4y ago
  > they have always also at least given back something to the community to earn some good will The busybox authors disagree: https://busybox.net/license.html https://busybox.net/license.html
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
Most people I know who contribute, or host open source projects, me included, do this for references. And the most successful ones find a way to generate revenue. "Giving back" is a nice additional thing, but I don't know anybody who does that _primarily_ to "help the world"
dijit 4y ago
> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. §5.c of the GPL Version 3 states explicitly: > You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it. As in, all modifications must be made available. Is that not meeting your definition of giving back? GPL (all variants) is one of the most widely distributed of the free software licenses and has an explicit "give back" clause as far as I can see it. -- and is part of why some people referred to GPL as a "cancer". FWIW the issue I've come to have with copilot is that you're not explicitly permitted to use the suggestions for anything other than inspiration (as per their terms), there is no license given to use the code that is generated. You do so at your own risk.
- desas 4y ago
  Modifications you distribute have to be given back. You don't have to distribute the modifications though.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Not given back to the original authors, but given to the users.
    - uuuguaii 4y ago
      Issue is that many large corporations use FLOSS internally with heavy extensions/modifications and never give back to the community. They don't have to, since all users are in-housr, and those tend to have access to the source code. But that's ok. If upstream is somewhat active then it's just a pain to keep maintaining your in-house patches, compared to sending them upstream. So that's automatically a motivator. If upstream is not active, then it does not matter anyway.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
numpad0 4y ago
then that's a problem- not dissimilar to ^ Discontinuity here.
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Trivial functions aren't copyrightable, so it doesn't matter whether they are GPL or not.
rdiddly 4y ago
Yeah on the one hand, isn't opening your source all about not really minding what happens to it after that? It's intended to be copied and used. On the other hand something about the term "laundering" kind of resonated for me. It's kind of like automated plagiarism where you spread your copying out over millions of people. But plagiarism only has meaning as an offense when the thing being copied isn't intended to be copied. But for copyright purposes is there a difference between copying exactly, and the type of blending a LLM does? I'm too confused. That feeling when you hit on something society has never thought about before.
- lionkor 4y ago
  no, open source isn't about practically giving up your rights, its about restricting use of your code and software in exactly such a way that it gives every user as much freedom as possible.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  If we go by how many people explain open source, you would be right, but if we go by how people who actually know what their licenses are supposed to do explain open source, then no. You give a license for a specific reason. One might be to allow others to copy, but there is usually a condition, and that is to leave the license information intact. If we go further towards free/libre software licenses like GPL or AGPL, then we have more conditions to it. For example that, if you distribute software using that code, you need to distribute the source of your software as well (a bit imprecise). If you want to get a better picture of the situation, read up on the licenses and what they do, specifically the term "copyleft".
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    That's why OSS is not about the contents of more restrictive licences (as you say, copyleft is a good example), but about the broadest definition that applies to all of them. More specialised sub-types can have more conditions, but then we should speak about those sub-types directly. I make this point because it causes confusion. Saying "my OSS project is being run by others for money and I get none of it" is confusing, as it uses the supertype. Using the subtype is clearer, and even self-explanatory: "my project I licenced so others can make money from it while giving me none is being run by others to make money from it and I get none". That may be a bad situation, but at least the reasons are now clear.
layer8 4y ago
One possible problem is if Copilot gets good enough that you can rather easily sidestep GPL (or any other license) by having Copilot implement functionality X for you instead of using a license-bound library providing X. Not only may this be questionable regarding the license, but it would also be tend to reduce contributions to the library which otherwise would have been used.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  Shouldn't be different from a human ripping or regurgitating parts of the code. If it's not a hard derivation, then it's difficult to prove or even notice.
  - layer8 4y ago
    My point was more about the possible negative effects than about the legality. An important difference is that AIs are much cheaper than a human. Having a library reimplemented by a human usually isn’t cost-effective, but having it done by an AI may become viable. That could cause a major change in the open-source dynamics, while possibly also reducing average software quality (because less code is publicly scrutinized).
  - feanaro 4y ago
    It shouldn't matter. If your model touched X during training, it should be seen as producing derivative work. This is the reason humans use clean room implementation techniques.
    - the_gipsy 4y ago
      The opposite of clean room is probably much more common.
    - usrbinbash 4y ago
      > If your model touched X during training, it should be seen as producing derivative work. I as a programmer touched X during training (learning how to code). Is all my work now derivative because of that?
uuuguaii 4y ago
> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. In essence, copyleft licenses are exactly that. They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors would end up providing the same end result since the original authors would be both allowed to and reasonably expected to distribute the derived work to their users as well. This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me. Obviously as long as you only use them privately you are not obliged to anything, the copyleft author gives you that option, but once you publish any of this, we all share the results. That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous. That's what Copilot does since it ignores this deal.
- bruce511 4y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this as a general point of view. Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim >> The original authors tend to be the users There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them. Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that requires a fork to "push" bug fixes to him. >> This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me. I think you are reading terms into the license that simply don't exist. I agree a lot of programmers -believe- this is how Free Software works, and many do push bug fixes upstream, but that's orthogonal to Free Software principles, and outside the terms of the license. >> That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous. Licenses are matters of law, not spirit. The original post is about this "spirit". My thesis is that he, and you, are inferring responsibilities that are simply not in the license. This isn't a technicality,it goes to the very heart of Free Software.
  - 4y ago
viciousplant 4y ago
Time will tell, and it's a destined trend for more devs close sourcing their code no matter what curious angle you are trying to justify large firms using AI exploiting money, and I doubt you are working for one of them.
ksec 4y ago
>I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. Well I guess you know why you may be hated for this already. For anyone who has surf HN since ~2010 would know or should notice the definition of open source has changed over the past 10-15 years. Giving Back and Communities are the two predominant Open Source ideals now. Along with making lots money on top of OSS code being somewhat a contentious issue to say the least. But I want to side step the idealistic issue and think this is more of an economic issue. Where this could be attributed as a zero interest rate phenomenon. You now have developers ( especially those from US ) for most if not all of their professional life living under the money / investment were easy, comparatively speaking. And they should give back when money ( or should I say cash flow ) isn’t an issue. When $200K Total Comp were suppose to be the norm for fresh grad joining Google. And management thinking $500K is barely enough they need to work their way to $1M, while seniors developer believes if Junior were worth $200K than they are asking for $1M total comp is perfectly sane, or some other extreme where everyone in the company should earn exactly the same. If Twitter or social media were any indication you see a lot of these ideals were completely gone from the conversation. Although this somehow started before the layoffs. It is somewhat interesting to see the sociologic and idealogical changes with respect to economics changes. But then again, economics in itself is perhaps the largest field psychology study.
EarlKing 4y ago
Co-pilot spits back protected expressions, not novel expressions based on ideas harvested from code. It is therefore violating the licenses of numerous free and open source projects. The author is right to be pissed.
- natch 4y ago
  This seems to be what people imagine about it, not what it actually does, although I don’t doubt you could cherry-pick some snippet after a lot of trial and error to try to claim that it had regurgitated something verbatim. But certainly let’s see the examples.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    You never know if a snippet it created came from another project verbatim or not… unless you claim you know all of the code that exists?
    - bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
      That's a bit extreme. In theory, an LLM's proclivity for plagiarism could be studied by testing it with various prompts and searching its training data for its responses (maybe with some edit distance tolerance).
      - bombolo 4y ago
        Except the training data is secret…
        natch 4y ago
        You can search github and other open sources to find at least a likely subset of the training data though.
        bombolo 4y ago
HenriTEL 4y ago
> On the one hand we happily train humans on GPL code. Those humans can then write their own functions,but for trivial functions they're gonna look a lot like GPL Source. Exactly. People are getting mad that Microsoft is making good money while the people who made all that free software available mostly did it for free (like in no money and no recognition). It can sound unfair but that's the deal. If you didn't want people or AI to learn from your code, open source was not the right option.
- mftrhu 4y ago
  > If you didn't want people or AI to learn from your code, open source was not the right option. There's nothing wrong with other people using - learning and creating derivative works of - one's open-source code, provided they respect the terms of the license. It seems to me that the real issue is the fact that these licenses don't have enough teeth.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. You're right. It's a politeness law some people have invented. It's also a value people have, but that's for themselves. I like contributing to OSS projects. But, as soon as it's imposed on others, and there are punishments for disobeying, it's a politeness law.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  Politeness keeps society civil and sane.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Politeness laws don't. They calcify and oppress.
    - felixgallo 4y ago
      Could you link to a politeness law on the books that you feel is oppressive?
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        On the books? I mean laws like "you shouldn't make money from OSS made by someone else". The context of this chat.
        felixgallo 4y ago
        oh, so those things are what people call "opinions", which they are completely allowed to have, just as you have yours. They aren't oppressing you, they don't expose you to penalties, you can't get thrown in jail.
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        No, not just opinions. I don't understand why you'd redefine what I'm saying, as though that invalidates the original statement. It's not exactly difficult to spot.
bombolo 4y ago
> If the AI is regurgitating GPL code as-is, then that's a problem- not dissimilar to a student or employee regurgitating the same code. Not "if". We know it does. And since it doesn't show citations, it might be the case that you use and mistakenly end up making your entire software GPL, because of including copy pasted GPL software.
bostik 4y ago
I would say that open source as a movement sprung up from the principles of early netiquette[0]. Which themselves were built on the foundations of sharing your knowledge with your peers. Whether you were trawling Usenet or just a presence in your local BBS scene, "teach it forward" was always a core concept. Still is. It's difficult to pay back to the person who taught you something valuable, so you can instead pay it forward by teaching the lessons - along with your own additions - to the later newcomers. Of course the Eternal September changed the landscape. And now we can't have nice things. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology#Netiquette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology#Netiqu...
- detourdog 4y ago
  I think the big move to formalization of GNU was that no free compilers for C existed. RS rightly saw this as a problem and did what he thought was needed to get a universal free c compiler.
gampleman 4y ago
From the MIT license: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Does GPT spit out the copyright notice when it regurgitates my code?
- Uvix 4y ago
  Is GPT spitting out “substantial portions” of your code?
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    It might. The ethical dilemma here seems to be: 1) We don't know when/if GPT will. GPT in its current form can't seem to guarantee safety (either from "substantial" verbatim snippets or from complex "hallucinations" of random pachinko output). 2) GPT doesn't know when/if it has. GPT in its current form likely cannot know this. (In part, because it doesn't really "know" anything, that's too anthropological a word for what is still mostly just a casino full of pachinko machines.) 3) Define "substantial portions" in a way that a jury of your peers can understand it in a court of law. 4) Can you define "substantial portions" again, only this time in code as guide rails for something like GPT? "Substantial portions" is barely a human term designed for human lawyers and courts. There's a fascinating challenge here on quantifying it.
lenkite 4y ago
IMHO, just like there was a robots.txt file made for the web, there needs to be a NOAI.txt for git repos. Sorry, this repo does not permit you to ingest the code for a learning model. Seems completely reasonable.
- xigoi 4y ago
  That wouldn't work. robots.txt is not enforceable.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  What would be the point of that? If we were somehow able to prevent AI models from ingesting a codebase, that would mean everyone else who wants to produce similar code would have to re-invent the wheel, wasting their time repeating work that has already been done. All because... the person who did it first wants attribution? They want their name to be included in some credits.txt file that nobody will ever read? That's ridiculous.
  - mftrhu 4y ago
    > All because... the person who did it first wants attribution? They want their name to be included in some credits.txt file that nobody will ever read? Yes, and yes. Those would be the terms that person publishes their code under. If you can't agree to those terms - maybe because including a single name in a credits.txt file that no-one reads is somehow too onerous for your process - then you are always free to re-implement that code on your own.
starkd 4y ago
Perhaps I'm out of the loop on this, but I always thought the concept of open source was primarily about the opportunity for personal professional development. The ability for someone not connected with a corporation to stay relevant and continuously update his skills in away that was not dependent on proprietary systems. That is a huge asset, not only for oneself but also for the the world.
- galleywest200 4y ago
  That may be a benefit, but the primary concept of open source is that its open source.
taink 4y ago
I agree that copyleft is more about "giving forward", and I think it's a confusion a lot of people make. Reading through the thread, I get the impression that some think as soon as one "distributes" the licensed material, original authors should get a copy. I'm extrapolating of course, but even then I feel some people would agree with that statement. GPL, for instance, merely states that distributed sources or patches "based on" the program should be "conveyed" under the same terms. In other words, anyone who gets their hands on it will do so under the same license. If anything, I would be worried that GitHub trained itself on publicly-available but not clearly licensed code, because then it would have no license to "use" it in any way[0]. GPL provides such a right, so there is no problem there. It would be even more worrying if the not clearly licensed code was in a private repository but I think I remember reading that private repositories were not included in the training data. However, would you consider a black box program, of which the output can consistently produce verbatim or at the very least slightly modified copies of code from GPL code to be transformative? The problem does not lie in how the code is distributed but in how transformative the distributed code is. Not only does the same apply to any program besides AI-powered software, it applies to humans[1]. Given how unpredictable the output of an AI is, one should not be able to train itself on GPL code if it cannot reliably guarantee it will not produce infringing code. [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... (https://archive.ph/susi0#4-license-grant-to-us https://archive.ph/susi0#4-license-grant-to-us) [1]: One such example would be how Microsoft employees allegedly prevented themselves from reading refterm source code, cf. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-873515286 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...
ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
I wonder if the GPLv4 will be coming out soon with an anti-AI-training clause (unless your output model and its outputs are also GPLv4, of course).
- cxr 4y ago
  People keep bringing this up. It's not as straightforward as a clause that says "you can't use this to train AI" (which is what I suspect many people think). Licensing operates on a continuum of permissiveness. They can only relax the restrictions that you as a creator are given by default. You can't write a copyright license that adds them. You could write a legal instrument that compels and prohibits certain behavior(s), but at that point you're talking about a contract. (And there's no way to coerce anyone to agree with the contract.) Harry Potter has even more restrictions than the GPL or any other open source license. It's "All Rights Reserved—it enjoys the maximum protections that a work can. And yet it would still be possible feed it into an AI model, even if all of Rowling, Bloomsbury, and Scholastic didn't want you to. They don't get a say in that. Nor do open source software developers in their works which selectively abandon some of the protections that Rowling reserves for herself and her business partners. The only real viable path to achieve this using an IP license alone would be a React PATENTS-like termination clause—if your company engages in any kind of AI training that uses this project as an input, then your license to make copies (including distributing modified copies) under the ordinary terms are revoked, along with revoking permission for a huge swathe of other free/open source software owned by a bunch of other signatories, too. This is, of course, contingent upon the ability to freely copy and modify a given set of works being appealing enough to get people to abstain from the lure of building AI models and offering services based on them.
  - ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
    I amend my wondering to the prepend the GPL thing with "I wonder how long it will take disney et al to make it illegal to train AI with their stuff" which then opens that door to the GPL
EthanHeilman 4y ago
It would be interesting to have Free Software License that requires that any thing which ingests the source code must be Free Software running on Free Hardware. If you train a model on such inputs, your model would need to be Free software and all the hardware the model runs on would need to be Free Hardware. This would create a massive incentivize to either not use such software in your model or to use Free Software and Free Hardware. Taken to its logical conclusion, you could add the notion of Free Humans are legally bound to only produce Free Ideas. One could imagine this functioning like sort of monastic vow of charity or chastity. "Vow of silence on producing anything which is not Free (as in freedom)." Would you take such a vow if offered 100,000 USD/year for the rest of your life (adjusted for inflation)? I would.
- b3morales 4y ago
  This idea ("make a stronger license") has come up in previous discussions of Copilot as well[0]. The problem is that the Copilot project doesn't claim to be abiding by the license(s) of the ingested code. The reply to licensing concerns was that licensing doesn't apply to their use. So unfortunately they would just claim they could ignore your hypothetical Free³ license as well. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277352
  - EthanHeilman 4y ago
    > The problem is that the Copilot project doesn't claim to be abiding by the license(s) of the ingested code. The reply to licensing concerns was that licensing doesn't apply to their use. I think github is largely correct in their view on licenses. However I would argue that you could create a stronger legal binding than say a GPL-3 license. For instance you could require and enforce that anyone that wishes to read the repo must sign a legal contract or EULA: "By decrypting this git repo you are agreeing to the following licenses, restrictions, contractual obligations, ..."

japhyr 4y ago

No need to hate on you for a valid response. I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime. Licenses were written for humans working with code. We can talk about corporations as well, but when I've thought about corporations in the past, I thought about people working on code at corporations. The idea of an AI using my open source project to generate working code for someone or some corporation feels...different. Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. But feelings are worth talking about, especially as we're all finding the boundaries of new tools and new ways of working. I don't agree with everything in the post, but I think this is a great conversation to be having.

bruce511 4y ago
I agree that AI usage of code is somewhat murky with current licenses,which obviously don't mention it either way. Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it." GPL code can be used by the military to develop nuclear weapons. Given that the is a guiding principle of the FSF its hard to argue that the current usage is not OK.
- eulenteufel 4y ago
  I have no problem with Copilot being trained on AGPL code and the getting released with a AGPL compatible license. Free to do whatever they want with it. The problem is Copilot training on source code and then discarding any restrictions of the licenses. Maybe it is legal right now but I'm sure this case will find it's way into open source licenses pretty soon.
  - hikawaii 4y ago
    Do we know if CoPilot X was trained on AGPL, not just GPL? Additionally I'm not sure if AGPL does anything. I suspect the ethics and such of licensing when large fractions of work are training AI and using AI need to be worked out rather than getting mad at any individual. What does copy left look like for AI?
    - zelphirkalt 4y ago
      There is indeed a problem of transparency right now. Companies afaik did not release the complete training data set. Might even be intentionally, because they do not want to risk, that they trained it on stuff they should not have had, without building in license and attribution into the output of their models. Or it might be, that they know that to be a fact. I can only hope, that lawmakers hurry to catch up with reality and impose transparency obligations for AI models.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago

slg 4y ago

If we are being honest as a community, open source developer are pretty far down the list of groups with valid grievances against this current wave of AI for how they are trained. There is at least a debatable case that these systems are operating in the spirit if not the exact letter of general open source licenses. It is a much harder argument to make for the AI trained on writing and art that is clearly copyrighted. If you have ethical questions about Copilot, you really should be against this entire crop of AI systems.

marcus_holmes 4y ago
So you're suggesting that developers shut up and let the artists talk first? I'm not sure what the "you're suffering less than these other people" thing is actually intended to translate into? What do we do with that? All software licences are based on copyright, same as writing, art, music, etc. Some software licences are permissive. Some writing is permissive (e.g. Cory Doctorow). Some music is permissive (e.g. Amanda Palmer). It entirely depends on what the author wants. The fact that more software is permissive is a good thing, right? I entirely agree that there are ethical problems with training AI on copyrighted training data. But please let's not start gatekeeping this. We need to have a serious discussion as a culture about it, and saying "you're way down the list of victims" isn't helping.
- slg 4y ago
  > So you're suggesting that developers shut up and let the artists talk first? I'm not sure what the "you're suffering less than these other people" thing is actually intended to translate into? What do we do with that? The tech community has a tendency to not care about issues like this until it effects us. I’m not telling people to shut up about this. I’m saying don’t be a hypocrite. If this is the wrong approach for GitHub, it is a problem with the way all these AI are trained.
  - _cenw 4y ago
    This is a pattern of argument I see all the time in minority communities, and it really irks me the wrong way. You are allowed to care about the things you care about and not have a concrete well-informed opinion on something related that might be more pressing. It only becomes hypocricy as soon as you actively dismiss the other thing as if you were well-informed. And I don't see anyone here doing that.

rob74 4y ago

You're allowed to make money from Free/OSS code, and plenty of companies have (Google, Amazon etc.), but they have always also at least given back something to the community to earn some good will. The situation with AI is new because it not only doesn't give anything back, it actually takes something away by threatening developers' jobs etc.

dolmen 4y ago
> they have always also at least given back something to the community to earn some good will The busybox authors disagree: https://busybox.net/license.html https://busybox.net/license.html

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

Most people I know who contribute, or host open source projects, me included, do this for references. And the most successful ones find a way to generate revenue. "Giving back" is a nice additional thing, but I don't know anybody who does that _primarily_ to "help the world"

dijit 4y ago

> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. §5.c of the GPL Version 3 states explicitly: > You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it. As in, all modifications must be made available. Is that not meeting your definition of giving back? GPL (all variants) is one of the most widely distributed of the free software licenses and has an explicit "give back" clause as far as I can see it. -- and is part of why some people referred to GPL as a "cancer". FWIW the issue I've come to have with copilot is that you're not explicitly permitted to use the suggestions for anything other than inspiration (as per their terms), there is no license given to use the code that is generated. You do so at your own risk.

desas 4y ago
Modifications you distribute have to be given back. You don't have to distribute the modifications though.
- yakubin 4y ago
  Not given back to the original authors, but given to the users.
  - uuuguaii 4y ago
    Issue is that many large corporations use FLOSS internally with heavy extensions/modifications and never give back to the community. They don't have to, since all users are in-housr, and those tend to have access to the source code. But that's ok. If upstream is somewhat active then it's just a pain to keep maintaining your in-house patches, compared to sending them upstream. So that's automatically a motivator. If upstream is not active, then it does not matter anyway.
  - sokoloff 4y ago

numpad0 4y ago

then that's a problem- not dissimilar to ^ Discontinuity here.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago

Trivial functions aren't copyrightable, so it doesn't matter whether they are GPL or not.

rdiddly 4y ago

Yeah on the one hand, isn't opening your source all about not really minding what happens to it after that? It's intended to be copied and used. On the other hand something about the term "laundering" kind of resonated for me. It's kind of like automated plagiarism where you spread your copying out over millions of people. But plagiarism only has meaning as an offense when the thing being copied isn't intended to be copied. But for copyright purposes is there a difference between copying exactly, and the type of blending a LLM does? I'm too confused. That feeling when you hit on something society has never thought about before.

lionkor 4y ago
no, open source isn't about practically giving up your rights, its about restricting use of your code and software in exactly such a way that it gives every user as much freedom as possible.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
If we go by how many people explain open source, you would be right, but if we go by how people who actually know what their licenses are supposed to do explain open source, then no. You give a license for a specific reason. One might be to allow others to copy, but there is usually a condition, and that is to leave the license information intact. If we go further towards free/libre software licenses like GPL or AGPL, then we have more conditions to it. For example that, if you distribute software using that code, you need to distribute the source of your software as well (a bit imprecise). If you want to get a better picture of the situation, read up on the licenses and what they do, specifically the term "copyleft".
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  That's why OSS is not about the contents of more restrictive licences (as you say, copyleft is a good example), but about the broadest definition that applies to all of them. More specialised sub-types can have more conditions, but then we should speak about those sub-types directly. I make this point because it causes confusion. Saying "my OSS project is being run by others for money and I get none of it" is confusing, as it uses the supertype. Using the subtype is clearer, and even self-explanatory: "my project I licenced so others can make money from it while giving me none is being run by others to make money from it and I get none". That may be a bad situation, but at least the reasons are now clear.

layer8 4y ago

One possible problem is if Copilot gets good enough that you can rather easily sidestep GPL (or any other license) by having Copilot implement functionality X for you instead of using a license-bound library providing X. Not only may this be questionable regarding the license, but it would also be tend to reduce contributions to the library which otherwise would have been used.

the_gipsy 4y ago
Shouldn't be different from a human ripping or regurgitating parts of the code. If it's not a hard derivation, then it's difficult to prove or even notice.
- layer8 4y ago
  My point was more about the possible negative effects than about the legality. An important difference is that AIs are much cheaper than a human. Having a library reimplemented by a human usually isn’t cost-effective, but having it done by an AI may become viable. That could cause a major change in the open-source dynamics, while possibly also reducing average software quality (because less code is publicly scrutinized).
- feanaro 4y ago
  It shouldn't matter. If your model touched X during training, it should be seen as producing derivative work. This is the reason humans use clean room implementation techniques.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    The opposite of clean room is probably much more common.
  - usrbinbash 4y ago
    > If your model touched X during training, it should be seen as producing derivative work. I as a programmer touched X during training (learning how to code). Is all my work now derivative because of that?

uuuguaii 4y ago

> I'm not aware of any Open Source license,or Free license for that matter,that has a give-back clause. Source code is available to -users- ,not prior-authors. In essence, copyleft licenses are exactly that. They oblige the author of a derived work to publish the changes to all users under the same terms. The original authors tend to be users. So, a license which would grant this directly to the original authors would end up providing the same end result since the original authors would be both allowed to and reasonably expected to distribute the derived work to their users as well. This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me. Obviously as long as you only use them privately you are not obliged to anything, the copyleft author gives you that option, but once you publish any of this, we all share the results. That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous. That's what Copilot does since it ignores this deal.

bruce511 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this as a general point of view. Speaking generally, I'm not sure that one can claim >> The original authors tend to be the users There are endless forks of say emacs,and I expect RMS is not s user of any of them. Of course RMS is free to inspect the code for all of them, separate out bug fixes from features, and retro apply it to his build. But I'm not seeing anything in any license that requires a fork to "push" bug fixes to him. >> This aligns with the reason why some people publish their work under copyleft licenses: You get my work, for free, and the deal is that if you find and fix bugs then I get to benefit from those fixes by them flowing back to me. I think you are reading terms into the license that simply don't exist. I agree a lot of programmers -believe- this is how Free Software works, and many do push bug fixes upstream, but that's orthogonal to Free Software principles, and outside the terms of the license. >> That's the spirit here and trying to argue around that with technicalities is disingenuous. Licenses are matters of law, not spirit. The original post is about this "spirit". My thesis is that he, and you, are inferring responsibilities that are simply not in the license. This isn't a technicality,it goes to the very heart of Free Software.
- 4y ago

viciousplant 4y ago

Time will tell, and it's a destined trend for more devs close sourcing their code no matter what curious angle you are trying to justify large firms using AI exploiting money, and I doubt you are working for one of them.

ksec 4y ago

>I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. Well I guess you know why you may be hated for this already. For anyone who has surf HN since ~2010 would know or should notice the definition of open source has changed over the past 10-15 years. Giving Back and Communities are the two predominant Open Source ideals now. Along with making lots money on top of OSS code being somewhat a contentious issue to say the least. But I want to side step the idealistic issue and think this is more of an economic issue. Where this could be attributed as a zero interest rate phenomenon. You now have developers ( especially those from US ) for most if not all of their professional life living under the money / investment were easy, comparatively speaking. And they should give back when money ( or should I say cash flow ) isn’t an issue. When $200K Total Comp were suppose to be the norm for fresh grad joining Google. And management thinking $500K is barely enough they need to work their way to $1M, while seniors developer believes if Junior were worth $200K than they are asking for $1M total comp is perfectly sane, or some other extreme where everyone in the company should earn exactly the same. If Twitter or social media were any indication you see a lot of these ideals were completely gone from the conversation. Although this somehow started before the layoffs. It is somewhat interesting to see the sociologic and idealogical changes with respect to economics changes. But then again, economics in itself is perhaps the largest field psychology study.

EarlKing 4y ago

Co-pilot spits back protected expressions, not novel expressions based on ideas harvested from code. It is therefore violating the licenses of numerous free and open source projects. The author is right to be pissed.

natch 4y ago
This seems to be what people imagine about it, not what it actually does, although I don’t doubt you could cherry-pick some snippet after a lot of trial and error to try to claim that it had regurgitated something verbatim. But certainly let’s see the examples.
- bombolo 4y ago
  You never know if a snippet it created came from another project verbatim or not… unless you claim you know all of the code that exists?
  - bqmjjx0kac 4y ago
    That's a bit extreme. In theory, an LLM's proclivity for plagiarism could be studied by testing it with various prompts and searching its training data for its responses (maybe with some edit distance tolerance).
    - bombolo 4y ago
      Except the training data is secret…
      - natch 4y ago
        You can search github and other open sources to find at least a likely subset of the training data though.
        bombolo 4y ago

HenriTEL 4y ago

> On the one hand we happily train humans on GPL code. Those humans can then write their own functions,but for trivial functions they're gonna look a lot like GPL Source. Exactly. People are getting mad that Microsoft is making good money while the people who made all that free software available mostly did it for free (like in no money and no recognition). It can sound unfair but that's the deal. If you didn't want people or AI to learn from your code, open source was not the right option.

mftrhu 4y ago
> If you didn't want people or AI to learn from your code, open source was not the right option. There's nothing wrong with other people using - learning and creating derivative works of - one's open-source code, provided they respect the terms of the license. It seems to me that the real issue is the fact that these licenses don't have enough teeth.

robertlagrant 4y ago

> I'm gonna get hated on for this, but I don't think "give back" is an open source concept. You're right. It's a politeness law some people have invented. It's also a value people have, but that's for themselves. I like contributing to OSS projects. But, as soon as it's imposed on others, and there are punishments for disobeying, it's a politeness law.

Eisenstein 4y ago
Politeness keeps society civil and sane.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Politeness laws don't. They calcify and oppress.
  - felixgallo 4y ago
    Could you link to a politeness law on the books that you feel is oppressive?
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      On the books? I mean laws like "you shouldn't make money from OSS made by someone else". The context of this chat.
      - felixgallo 4y ago
        oh, so those things are what people call "opinions", which they are completely allowed to have, just as you have yours. They aren't oppressing you, they don't expose you to penalties, you can't get thrown in jail.
        robertlagrant 4y ago
        No, not just opinions. I don't understand why you'd redefine what I'm saying, as though that invalidates the original statement. It's not exactly difficult to spot.

bombolo 4y ago

> If the AI is regurgitating GPL code as-is, then that's a problem- not dissimilar to a student or employee regurgitating the same code. Not "if". We know it does. And since it doesn't show citations, it might be the case that you use and mistakenly end up making your entire software GPL, because of including copy pasted GPL software.

bostik 4y ago

I would say that open source as a movement sprung up from the principles of early netiquette[0]. Which themselves were built on the foundations of sharing your knowledge with your peers. Whether you were trawling Usenet or just a presence in your local BBS scene, "teach it forward" was always a core concept. Still is. It's difficult to pay back to the person who taught you something valuable, so you can instead pay it forward by teaching the lessons - along with your own additions - to the later newcomers. Of course the Eternal September changed the landscape. And now we can't have nice things. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology#Netiquette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology#Netiqu...

detourdog 4y ago
I think the big move to formalization of GNU was that no free compilers for C existed. RS rightly saw this as a problem and did what he thought was needed to get a universal free c compiler.

gampleman 4y ago

From the MIT license: > The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Does GPT spit out the copyright notice when it regurgitates my code?

Uvix 4y ago
Is GPT spitting out “substantial portions” of your code?
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  It might. The ethical dilemma here seems to be: 1) We don't know when/if GPT will. GPT in its current form can't seem to guarantee safety (either from "substantial" verbatim snippets or from complex "hallucinations" of random pachinko output). 2) GPT doesn't know when/if it has. GPT in its current form likely cannot know this. (In part, because it doesn't really "know" anything, that's too anthropological a word for what is still mostly just a casino full of pachinko machines.) 3) Define "substantial portions" in a way that a jury of your peers can understand it in a court of law. 4) Can you define "substantial portions" again, only this time in code as guide rails for something like GPT? "Substantial portions" is barely a human term designed for human lawyers and courts. There's a fascinating challenge here on quantifying it.

lenkite 4y ago

IMHO, just like there was a robots.txt file made for the web, there needs to be a NOAI.txt for git repos. Sorry, this repo does not permit you to ingest the code for a learning model. Seems completely reasonable.

xigoi 4y ago
That wouldn't work. robots.txt is not enforceable.
welshwelsh 4y ago
What would be the point of that? If we were somehow able to prevent AI models from ingesting a codebase, that would mean everyone else who wants to produce similar code would have to re-invent the wheel, wasting their time repeating work that has already been done. All because... the person who did it first wants attribution? They want their name to be included in some credits.txt file that nobody will ever read? That's ridiculous.
- mftrhu 4y ago
  > All because... the person who did it first wants attribution? They want their name to be included in some credits.txt file that nobody will ever read? Yes, and yes. Those would be the terms that person publishes their code under. If you can't agree to those terms - maybe because including a single name in a credits.txt file that no-one reads is somehow too onerous for your process - then you are always free to re-implement that code on your own.

starkd 4y ago

Perhaps I'm out of the loop on this, but I always thought the concept of open source was primarily about the opportunity for personal professional development. The ability for someone not connected with a corporation to stay relevant and continuously update his skills in away that was not dependent on proprietary systems. That is a huge asset, not only for oneself but also for the the world.

galleywest200 4y ago
That may be a benefit, but the primary concept of open source is that its open source.

taink 4y ago

I agree that copyleft is more about "giving forward", and I think it's a confusion a lot of people make. Reading through the thread, I get the impression that some think as soon as one "distributes" the licensed material, original authors should get a copy. I'm extrapolating of course, but even then I feel some people would agree with that statement. GPL, for instance, merely states that distributed sources or patches "based on" the program should be "conveyed" under the same terms. In other words, anyone who gets their hands on it will do so under the same license. If anything, I would be worried that GitHub trained itself on publicly-available but not clearly licensed code, because then it would have no license to "use" it in any way[0]. GPL provides such a right, so there is no problem there. It would be even more worrying if the not clearly licensed code was in a private repository but I think I remember reading that private repositories were not included in the training data. However, would you consider a black box program, of which the output can consistently produce verbatim or at the very least slightly modified copies of code from GPL code to be transformative? The problem does not lie in how the code is distributed but in how transformative the distributed code is. Not only does the same apply to any program besides AI-powered software, it applies to humans[1]. Given how unpredictable the output of an AI is, one should not be able to train itself on GPL code if it cannot reliably guarantee it will not produce infringing code. [0]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... (https://archive.ph/susi0#4-license-grant-to-us https://archive.ph/susi0#4-license-grant-to-us) [1]: One such example would be how Microsoft employees allegedly prevented themselves from reading refterm source code, cf. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomment-873515286 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago

I wonder if the GPLv4 will be coming out soon with an anti-AI-training clause (unless your output model and its outputs are also GPLv4, of course).

cxr 4y ago
People keep bringing this up. It's not as straightforward as a clause that says "you can't use this to train AI" (which is what I suspect many people think). Licensing operates on a continuum of permissiveness. They can only relax the restrictions that you as a creator are given by default. You can't write a copyright license that adds them. You could write a legal instrument that compels and prohibits certain behavior(s), but at that point you're talking about a contract. (And there's no way to coerce anyone to agree with the contract.) Harry Potter has even more restrictions than the GPL or any other open source license. It's "All Rights Reserved—it enjoys the maximum protections that a work can. And yet it would still be possible feed it into an AI model, even if all of Rowling, Bloomsbury, and Scholastic didn't want you to. They don't get a say in that. Nor do open source software developers in their works which selectively abandon some of the protections that Rowling reserves for herself and her business partners. The only real viable path to achieve this using an IP license alone would be a React PATENTS-like termination clause—if your company engages in any kind of AI training that uses this project as an input, then your license to make copies (including distributing modified copies) under the ordinary terms are revoked, along with revoking permission for a huge swathe of other free/open source software owned by a bunch of other signatories, too. This is, of course, contingent upon the ability to freely copy and modify a given set of works being appealing enough to get people to abstain from the lure of building AI models and offering services based on them.
- ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
  I amend my wondering to the prepend the GPL thing with "I wonder how long it will take disney et al to make it illegal to train AI with their stuff" which then opens that door to the GPL

EthanHeilman 4y ago

It would be interesting to have Free Software License that requires that any thing which ingests the source code must be Free Software running on Free Hardware. If you train a model on such inputs, your model would need to be Free software and all the hardware the model runs on would need to be Free Hardware. This would create a massive incentivize to either not use such software in your model or to use Free Software and Free Hardware. Taken to its logical conclusion, you could add the notion of Free Humans are legally bound to only produce Free Ideas. One could imagine this functioning like sort of monastic vow of charity or chastity. "Vow of silence on producing anything which is not Free (as in freedom)." Would you take such a vow if offered 100,000 USD/year for the rest of your life (adjusted for inflation)? I would.

b3morales 4y ago
This idea ("make a stronger license") has come up in previous discussions of Copilot as well[0]. The problem is that the Copilot project doesn't claim to be abiding by the license(s) of the ingested code. The reply to licensing concerns was that licensing doesn't apply to their use. So unfortunately they would just claim they could ignore your hypothetical Free³ license as well. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34277352
- EthanHeilman 4y ago
  > The problem is that the Copilot project doesn't claim to be abiding by the license(s) of the ingested code. The reply to licensing concerns was that licensing doesn't apply to their use. I think github is largely correct in their view on licenses. However I would argue that you could create a stronger legal binding than say a GPL-3 license. For instance you could require and enforce that anyone that wishes to read the repo must sign a legal contract or EULA: "By decrypting this git repo you are agreeing to the following licenses, restrictions, contractual obligations, ..."