4 ms·

AFAIK that has nothing to do with the license, it has to do with whether the code is public. You don't want the AI accidentally revealing proprietary non-public

AFAIK that has nothing to do with the license, it has to do with whether the code is public. You don't want the AI accidentally revealing proprietary non-public information (e.g. imagine someone had a secret API key in a private repo and copilot leaked it; that'd be a huge incident), so you don't train it on that information, regardless of what it's licensed under. You could make a similar argument for not training on GPL code, but it's a lot easier to programmatically determine whether or not code is public than it is to programmatically determine what it's licensed under, particularly when you're training on massive amounts of unlabeled data. Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed.

AlexandrB 4y ago
> Not to mention it's way easier to delete an accidentally-added snippet of GPL code from a codebase than it is to "unleak" company secrets after they've been publicly revealed. How often do you think anyone will notice that some part of a proprietary codebase is copied substantially from GPL code? I think it's going to be very rare and a lot of this code will fly under the radar. The GPL was always a kind of legal jiu-jitsu, turning copyright against itself and allowing non-commercial entities to protect themselves from uncompensated exploitation. Models like copilot, if they're legal, upend the status quo tremendously. Even though your code isn't (always) used directly, a commercial entity like Microsoft will slurp it up and sell the resulting model back to you for $9.99/mo.