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Please don’t upload my code on GitHub
- cyberpunk 3y agoI get the sentiment, but people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license. If you don't want your code hosted in one place, say so in your license.
- lloeki 3y agoFrom TFA > Is this a legal document? > No, it isn’t. If the project is under an open source license, it means that everyone can share a copy – even on GitHub – of the licensed material under certain conditions. A license restricting this right wouldn’t be open source anymore. However, since GitHub may not respect the terms of licensed code that is hosted on their servers, not uploading the code of others there is, in fact, an ethical choice. emphasis mine. It's a "please be nice", not a "I want to enforce things"
- M4v3R 3y agoI don’t get this argument. “Here’s a legal document we wrote that says that you’re allowed to redistribute our code. But aside from it we’d like to you to not redistribute it on platforms we don’t like for whatever reason. But we won’t spell it out explicitly in the document itself because reasons, instead we’re guilt tripping everyone who does”. I respect developers right to put any restrictions on the code they share with the world. But I believe it should either be explicit or not restricted at all. Either write the license that says exactly what you want or otherwise don’t shame people into the desired behavior. Edit: one could even add a more generic statement to the license stating that it’s forbidden to share the code on any platform that would use it to train their AIs per their ToS, so you don’t need to single out GitHub and potentially others in the future.
- tpxl 3y agoThere's a ton of stuff people do because they were asked, not because they're legally required.
- xmzx 3y agoYou don't get ethics and morality not bound by law?
- Gigachad 3y agoEthics is subjective, the law less so. Most people don’t find GitHub to be unethical so the author will have a hard time convincing people without using the license terms.
- rob74 3y agoWell, that's the exact reason why they wrote this page: to explain to people why they think GitHub is unethical, and maybe convince them. It's the same as calls to boycott various other companies: they haven't necessarily done anything illegal, but if you convince enough people not to use their products/services anymore, you might make an impact...
- proto_lambda 3y agoThe author really doesn't have to convince anyone, "please don't do $X" is more than enough to state their wish for you not to do $X.
- mfru 3y agoi think it is quite scary that so many in here would just not honor a simple "please don't do it." it is a wish. if someone says "please don't wear shoes in my home" i hope you would honor their very simple and understandable personal wish without setting up a contract for it? i mean, just be a bit more human, please.
- Gigachad 3y agoI see it more like an artist telling me “please hang this picture in this orientation” but I prefer it differently and don’t see any reason why me hanging it the way I want in my home affects the author. My copy on GitHub doesn’t detract from their copy.
- webmobdev 3y agoA licensor cannot predict the future. When the GPL was written decades ago, nobody predicted that BigTech would start using it on their servers to offer it as "services", and claim that they didn't need to distribute the source code of the customisations they made because they were (technically) not distributing the software itself but only running it on their servers. Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument. But it was believed to be legally tenable (1). So the AGPL license was created to counter this move and preserve the original philosophy of the GPL that users of a software should have access to the source code. (1) Though I don't know if this has been actually tested in court - courts in India have more freedom to broadly interpret social contracts like the GPL, unlike the US courts, and a positive outcome in favour of upholding the license even in such cases could be possible).
- Juliate 3y ago> Anyone who understood the intent and philosophy of the GPL license understood this as a bogus and unethical argument. I disagree here. The idea, intent, philosophy is one (crucial) thing, the resulting practical artefact (here the license) is another. It works exactly as it was designed to work. People/companies modifying GPL software for their own use (internal or external) without redistributing the software itself (so without requirement to redistribute the code) existed before SAAS grew on, only at the time, the small scale of this made it a bargain that was "interesting" only depending on one's capacity/hubris to maintain an internal fork on their own. *aaS hugely tipped the scale, and the side effects, but the mechanics are the same. And yes, that may not have been the original intent, and the AGPL is as valid a license as a reaction to provide a new tool more in line with the original intent, but that doesn't make the use of the existing GPL all within what it actually enables anyone to, invalid or unethical. (but maybe only in a specific perspective of the framework of the original intent)
- the_gipsy 3y agoWhen you decide a license, you can't know what currently existing or future platforms will some day start to violate an aspect of the license or of copyright itself. Does it make sense to add a retroactive clause, then?
- hibbelig 3y agoThere is no law that says you have to say “Good morning”, but yet parents teach their children to do. How is this case different?
- Juliate 3y agoIt would greatly improve by some text revisions: "my code", "We", on a generic page without clear authorship or object, on a dedicated subdomain, on a hosting domain, without a signature or contact or kind of option for a webring. It took me some time to get that this is a generic call (to be followed and reused), still with no clear ownership, rather than a specific claim to a specific code/project (or is it?).
- ignoramous 3y agoEthically, you'd think Copilot aligns with the ethos Open Source software. It isn't far off that multiple open source Copilot equivalent get as good as the commerical one. And we are all here for it!
- Gigachad 3y agoI don’t have any ethical dilemma by posting some open source code on the site I prefer.
- throwaway63086 3y ago>> Is this a legal document? >> No, it isn’t. My limited understanding of international copyright law is that copyright disclaimers/licenses per Berne Convention are documents stating the author's wishes no different than this one. When a judge is going to be shown this page where the author states his explicit wish to not have his code uploaded code on Github, in direct conflict with his wishes stated in the LICENSE.txt file, I don't see how it will hold up in court as free software code.
- dataflow 3y ago> If you don't want your code hosted in one place, say so in your license. Also don't forget to go back in time to let your former self know which hosting providers will violate your license.
- Aachen 3y agoThere's an argument to be made that a neural net learning from your proprietary "source available" code isn't violating copyright. It's not an opinion I would trust the judge to take over necessarily (they might, or not) and hinge my business on, but it's an opinion one can have, so I don't know that github violated any licenses here as afaik there weren't any at the time which specifically stated that <insert definition which can tell what-we-call-AI training and human training apart> is not permitted. At least not until you successfully sue them for it in some jurisdiction.
- dataflow 3y agoThere have been quite a few cases of the neural nets spitting out the code they've been trained on verbatim, including comments IIRC. They're not just "learning" (if they're "learning" at all).
- asddubs 3y agoWell, it's a bit of a unique situation in that they don't directly care about the code being on github, but the secondary effect that it being on github has - microsoft violating the code license terms (which are in the license)
- Dalewyn 3y agoI would question why the "AI" community is being left to their own anarchist devices when they are clearly the core of the problem, instead arguing about licensing pedantics and semantics.
- kristiandupont 3y agoI think this is more likely to actually work. People don't read licenses and there is no CI that automatically enforces them. They might notice this badge though.
- serial_dev 3y agoOn the other hand, it requires only one determined person out of hundreds of thousands who, for whatever reason (trolling, principled open source maximalist, AI researcher, code archiver, etc), decides to mirror all code marked with this badge to GitHub.
- cyberpunk 3y agoEverywhere I've worked in the last few years has license checking as part of CI pipelines. Our builds fail if GPL'd code is detected in some .jar or whatever. (fossology and x-ray both provide this)
- throw_m239339 3y ago> I get the sentiment, but people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license. If you don't want your code hosted in one place, say so in your license. I mean even doing that will not protect anybody's code, Microsoft doesn't care, they might also be scanning gitlab or bitbucket and doing model training on these. The only way to protect your code at that point is to stay closed source. It's as simple as that. It's no different from all these models trained on content without permission, whether it be articles or photos,... until all these corporations are sued or copyright laws change to adapt ML, they'll train their model on content regardless of the its license since they are getting away with it.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoRestaurant owners also didn't care about renumerating composers of the melodies they were playing. Then copyright laws happened.
- fsckboy 3y agoI don't think you got the sentiment. It's pretty clear in the article, I hesitate just just cut and paste it here, but the idea is that Github is not respecting some terms of some licenses, so if you upload another authors code to github, you are exposing the author rights to github's depradations.
- ketzu 3y ago> people can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license I agree with 'can', but I find 'should' a weird choice of words here. I don't think we are better off by phrasing hyper-specific licenses (or laws).
- tremon 3y agopeople can and should do whatever you permit them to in your license Github has been consistently arguing that they're not bound by the distribution license when training their Copilot model, so I'm not sure what difference that would make.
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- webmobdev 3y agoGPL and AGPL allows you to add more clauses to the license if they don't clash with any existing ones. The FSF should certainly share some guidelines on how we can include and extend the license through an additional "anti-ML / anti-AI" clause.
- tpxl 3y agoThere's no clause you can add to A/GPL that will help with this. You can't forbid use cases because that would clash with the license, and Github already blatantly ignores the attribution clauses, so there's nothing you can do there either.
- az226 3y agoGitHub’s EULA gives GitHub permission to train Copilot on public code you host on GitHub regardless of the license you have chosen for that code. Even without this, in terms of copyright, since Copilot doesn’t do what your public code does, and it only uses your code to train, it is a transformative use, and would be fair use. It’s possible that a court case will find otherwise, but I think that’s unlikely. The only case I think it will become disallowed, is if Congress passes a law about it. If Congress does pass such a law, GitHub’s market power in this domain only goes up, since the EULA gives it the covenants.
- tpxl 3y agoAn EULA doesn't trump copyright laws and spitting out code it was trained on is clearly not transformative.
- az226 3y agoSpitting out lines or paragraphs from a repo is most likely fair use. Unless you can reproduce a substantial portion of a repo, I think it’s going to be an uphill battle to argue it isn’t fair use. Though I suspect Copilot’s suppression feature will make doing so impossible.
- yevvy 3y agoRead through the github "problems" following the link and it reads as "for profit organisation makes for profit tools"... Great. I think github, after stackoverflow, is the best thing that happened to developers.
- gabrielgio 3y ago... until for profiting goes against developing a good service. > I think github, after stackoverflow, is the best thing that happened to developers. I don't think github is bad tooling (there are worse), but the best thing for developer? I don't see anything on github that is greatly better than what we have in other services.
- barbs 3y agoI think git itself is better, personally.
- gabrielgio 3y agoI think the same thing. Before git I was using TFVC and git was huge improvement in pretty much every aspect of code version control.
- kryptiskt 3y agoGithub was a huge step up at the time, compared to Sourceforge and Google Code and the like. Git itself helped, since checking out code from Subversion and CVS didn't give you the history, so you'd lose that if you wanted to publish your own fork.
- vadiml 3y agoI'm really baffled by all this discussion on copyrights in the age of AI. The Copilot does not 'steal' or and reproduce our code - it simply LEARNS from it as a human coder would learn from it. IMHO desire to prevent learning from your open source code seems kind of irrational and antithetical to open source ideas.
- eptcyka 3y agoHumans don't learn an algorithm by memorizing a particular implementation character by character.
- vadiml 3y agoThere are people who do it... I personally know a guy whit photographic memory
- j16sdiz 3y agoHe don't get an exemption from copyright law, or do he?
- remix2000 3y agoNeither does copilot.
- eptcyka 3y agoBut it does though. There have been many times where this was the case.
- Kiro 3y agoIt only happens if you bait it really hard and push it into a corner. That's not representative at all. I use Copilot to write highly niched code that's based on my own repo. It's simply amazing at understanding the context and suggest things I was about to write anyway. Nothing it produces is just copypasted character by character. Not even close.
- praptak 3y agoMaybe it's a good point for a mini-ask HN: assuming you agree with the sentiment, what is your preferred alternative to GitHub?
- pabs3 3y agogit-remote-ipfs or GitTorrent.
- mattrighetti 3y agoI would guess that GitLab is the most used one right after GitHub, but I may be incorrect.
- FrostKiwi 3y agoSelf-hosted Gitea.
- kjuulh 3y agoI use a self hosted gitea instance. Haven't had any issues with it, i can highly recommend it. Not super useful if you want contributions though xD
- 727564797069706 3y agosourcehut - the hacker's forge
- toastal 3y agoThere’s also the swath of non-Git DVCS options like Fossil, Mercurial, darcs, Pijul, et. al. and they have their own forge hosting options.
- Lutger 3y agoI still like Gitlab a lot and use it wherever I can. I think that it was once talked about very favorably on HN, but it seems to have lost its popularity after its IPO (or even earlier).
- cryo 3y agoSourcehut. I like how they approach things there, and am happy to pay for my account to support them.
- infoseek12 3y ago[flagged]
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agothe problem with this approach is that humans suck and this is an invitation for trolls to upload your code to github. i don't even know how you're supposed to solve this. you could proactively scan github for your code and try to get them to purge it if you find it i suppose, if that would remove your code from copilot. but even that is not a great solution because you would need to prove you're the actual author, and github would probably need to be involved in building a mechanism to do so, but they don't give a shit. i think the reality is the LLMs have eroded copyright protections and trying to fight it isn't likely to pay off
- sanxiyn 3y agoI think fighting this is very worthwhile. For example, I think the fight is the reason why The Stack, dataset produced from GitHub, has a form to request to remove code. https://www.bigcode-project.org/docs/about/the-stack/ https://www.bigcode-project.org/docs/about/the-stack/ I am hopeful that we can make the removal request form the standard industry practice.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agodo you know if the stack anticipated people who will claim ownership of and request removal of repositories that they do not own? it seems like complying would require github to expend a lot of effort to combat abuse.
- sanxiyn 3y agoThe Stack's removal request form is currently processed manually.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agooh sorry i misunderstood, i thought this was a project designed to request removal of code from github/copilot
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
- hahanomate 3y ago[flagged]
- nness 3y agoYou've clearly used a throwaway just to be contrarian, but have you considered not posting at all if it adds no value to the discussion?
- i-use-nixos-btw 3y agoI think it does. See, if a comment like that crops up on a civilised society like this, it demonstrates that the barren wastelands of “the outside world” will have similar examples.
- rcoveson 3y agoPlease upload all open source code to everywhere that will accept it. Make everything indestructible. Make it as easy as possible to find an authentic copy. Stick every bit of code with license that allows it in every free and proprietary neural network. Did you write the absolute best implementation of X? I want to see it everywhere. Everywhere. In every single place where X is needed or discussed. Where all fine X are sold. Don't you? Or do you genuinely want to narrow the people who see your impl by some signifnicant percentage because you got frustrated with the ugly capitalism of a recent distribution mechanism? If I invented Golden rice[0] I'd like to think I'd allow it to be sold at Panda Express and all the other evil capitalist chains, not just the local co-op whose business practices I prefer. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice
- tmtvl 3y agoIf I make a helmet with tracking to help rescue miners after a collapse I will not want to see it used by Qatar to track slaves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675370 This may seem an extreme comparison, but to one who deeply cares about Free Software as defined by the FSF, proprietary software is bad. That's the difference between people who prefer Apache/BSD/MIT licenses versus those who prefer the (A)GPL.
- rcoveson 3y agoThat’s like saying that pacifists who refuse to own guns don’t really think war is bad, because they won’t take up arms to implement peace. Fighting fire with fire is one option. Fighting fire with water is another.
- majikandy 3y agoNoted
- foul 3y agoIt will not change anything. AI farms will git-clone from any public repository. Someone concerned should just patent-troll any software that may or may not use a copilot-ed part of their code.
- toastal 3y ago*.code-workspace .github/ .vscode/ in your .gitignore is another way to express that you don’t want Microsoft as a part of your project.
- mcv 3y agoOf course this isn't just a problem with copyleft licenses on github, but also with non-open code on github. Only there the problem may be less visible. Ideally, github should check the license of the code it's using to feed copilot, and only use code with permissive licenses.
- fwlr 3y agoIf it was possible to point to where the code is actually stored in Copilot (i.e. run strings on the server and it spits out the copylefted code), I would be a lot more sympathetic to the view that LLMs are stealing code. Even if you decode the weights from floats to strings, you won't find the strings of code stored anywhere. It's probably not correct to say it's "learning" from code the same way humans are, but it is "learning" from code in the way LLMs learn. Fundamentally it seems to me that Copilot truly does synthesise code from some store of knowledge (even if it's hard to understand what this store of knowledge is), and the problem is that it's synthesising code identical to existing code. There are legal tools and also rhetoric that are designed for dealing with this problem of "synthesising something that is identical to an existing thing", and it's different tools and rhetoric from the ones we have for dealing with the problem of "stealing or copying existing things". It's valid to have an issue with with Copilot ingesting your code, but unfortunately people are largely using tools and rhetoric from the latter category to approach the issue, and that slight misapplication is causing their issues to fall on deaf ears a lot of the time.
- pmontra 3y agoWhat happens if I create a 10 lines function character by character identical to some proprietary or GPLled piece of code, without ever looking at that code nor knowing that it existed? I expect that the copyright holders could reach to me, tell me that my code is identical to theirs, believe or not that I independently created the same code, and at least ask me to stop distributing it. Of course t += total(e) is easier to defend than monthlyTotal += dailyTotal(expenses) because the chances that I didn't copy their code get slimmer and slimmer as the names of the identifiers and the structure of the code get more complex. If I actually looked at their code, it would be wiser from me to at least change the names, maybe also a little bit the structure of the code. That's the difference between being inspired by something and copying it. TL;DR: if Copilot generates a copy, it's a copy.
- gedy 3y agoI know the law doesn't work this way, but wonder if code that can be "learned" this easily should really be copyrightable, etc. These LLMs don't keep a copy of some code to paste in verbatim.
- varispeed 3y agoWhile I sympathise with the remarks, I think these arguments are wrong. In any programming language there are only that many ways to write something. For instance, iterate over a list of items and do some processing to them. So when someone publishes their code under GPL, suddenly millions of projects that come up with exactly the same code can be in a violation? I get this is complex, but copyrighting code is akin to copyrighting maths formulas. Imagine if a company selling bottled water could also copyright water. That's very much what is happening.
- dncornholio 3y agoYou can say anything you want in your licence, I guarantee you people will break it. If you don't want your code public, don't make it so. Because licenses are a thing of trust and you shouldn't trust anybody.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bluenose69 3y agoNaomi Klein's recent essay about AI^[1] suggests that the real "hallucination" problem in AI is that it's promoters are not seeing the real world clearly. Some of her points about the effect of AI rollout on human employment may be germane to the present discussion. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-mac...
- sph 3y agoYou're preaching to the cult here. There is a marked lack of AI criticism and skepticism on this forum. There's a few are trying to gaslight skeptics (yes, gaslight) that current AI is close to being sentient, and/or humans are not much smarter than it, and/or we should consider and evaluate its output as if it were created by a human. I don't know if it's laughable, or utterly terrifying giving such a powerful tool into the hands of reckless wannabe entrepreneurs.
- collaborative 3y agoIt's hype for suckers intentionally created by the mega corps (remember "Sparks of AGI"?). The real goal is to get away with theft long enough until the regulators give up and accept their right to be above the law (aka "disruption"). And then there's the army of intentionally misguided youtube creators that want to get views by showing how they created a website without knowing html
- asimpletune 3y agoI have a simple question: why does AI get unlimited training data, but human beings can't have a universal library, without limits?
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThe people with the money run the AI so they get to selectively enforce the rules.
- rizky05 3y ago[dead]
- trabant00 3y agoThe business model for disruptive "innovation": Weasel wording to evade legislation. It's not an unlicensed taxi, it's ride sharing. It's not an illegal hotel, it's couch surfing. It's not code licence infringement because it's learning. It's lawyers finding loopholes for finance to avoid expenses that gives them an edge over the poor suckers who play by the rules. The tech is just a tool to this purpose. And most people forget TANSTAAFL. The costs for the cars and their infrastructure, the load tourists put on a place, and the effort for writing the code are still there. The "innovators" just found a way to make somebody else pay for what should be their cost center.
- Wronnay 3y agoIsn't e.g. ChatGPT trained on data all over the internet? That means even if you upload your code to GitLab or your own public Gitea instance, it will still be used to train AIs?! I don't see the point of this because quite frankly - if you want to prevent AIs using your data, you already lost that battle in the moment you uploaded your Code to the publicly accessible internet.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Luker88 3y agoLet's leave copilot/AI aside for a moment. Do you actually have the necessary rights to upload some else's code to github? When you upload to github, you give it special rights not merely for redistribution and CI stuff. You give Github the rights to use the code for other github projects. That alone might not be compatible with some licenses (think GPL virality). So if your software is BSD or anything without attribution I can probably upload it without problems. But if your license requires so much as attribution, can I give Github the rights to use the code for any other internal project they might have? Remember that in Github TOS you give grants for any github service, and in some special cases it requires this to be without attribution. IANAL but I think I lack the necessary rights here, regardless of copilot.
- peppermint_gum 3y ago> So if your software is BSD or anything without attribution I can probably upload it without problems. BSD and MIT licenses absolutely do require an attribution.
- Luker88 3y agomost BSD versions require attribution, but there are multiple versions of BSD and at least one (the most basic) does not require attribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses
- dblitt 3y agoIANAL but I believe you are incorrect about the rights you grant GitHub. They are still bound by the license you set in your repository, including any copyleft in GPL or attribution requirements. GitHub TOS sections D.4-D.7 spell out the license that you must grant GitHub in order to host code there. “You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time.” Notably, see also section D.3 which states “If you upload Content that already comes with a license granting GitHub the permissions we need to run our Service, no additional license is required.” I would think any open source license would be sufficient license for those things, like storing and displaying code, and I would think this clause is primarily for code without a clear license not already granting these terms. To your point about redistribution, see this clause in D.4: “This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.”
- chillbill 3y agoThis will always be an issue as long as people can fork the code, so one might say we need a license that prevents a module from being used in ML training, better yet, we need a way for a commented line or something that'd pork the training pipeline if found in the source training, and removing it would violate the license.
- stared 3y agoI understand the sentiment, but I think it is misguided and therefore - counterproductive. First, LLMs learn patterns, not just copy and paste. If they generate verbatim copies of any non-trivial-enough part that would be the subject of a copyright license, yes, it would be copyright infringement. Yet, could anyone give such practical examples? And if so, how do they differ from a software engineer who copies and pastes code? Second, if the code is hosted anywhere else, there is no guarantee that Copilot (or another model) won't learn from that. The only way to make sure no one and nothing will learn from open-source code is to make it as closed as possible. Third, for me, the crucial part of open-source code is maintenance. GitHub is there and works well both as a platform for creation (I consider GitHub the most productive social network) and an archive. "No GitHub" (even as a mirror) means that the code is likely to be stored in places less likely to engage collaborators and less likely to last long.
- orlp 3y ago> If they generate verbatim copies of any non-trivial-enough part that would be the subject of a copyright license, yes, it would be copyright infringement. Yet, could anyone give such practical examples? Yes, there are many such examples. https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://codeium.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does-not https://codeium.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does-...
- psychphysic 3y agoTo be fair that is not verbatim. It is mutatis mutandis the same but is that a problem? I'm sure many would say so, I'm not convinced. Ultimately if his code is out there a Google search could bring up a snippet without the license visible and I might copy paste that. The crux is the same code might be presented without context. Copilot is just a tool and the personal responsible for it's safe usage is the human behind it. In my world view, if I copy a picture off Google image search ultimately I am morally the one who infringed copyright not Google.
- gorgoiler 3y agoI think of large models, ones such as CoPilot, as lossy compression with content addressable retrieval. If you type the first few parts of some content it has stored then it will retrieve the rest for you. The blocks retrieved are very small and many of them occur frequently. “if” followed by “(“ for example — hardly worthy of copyright, but we also know that they were literally taken from copyrighted material. (I don’t think the model starts out with any existing knowledge of syntax / grammar of, say, Python?) Even if some of that material was public domain, a lot of it wasn’t and at best requires attribution; at worst, full licensing conditions. To put it another way: it doesn’t matter how many vegetable ingredients they throw into the sausage or how elaborate the sausage making machine is: if they put pork in, the stuff that comes out ain’t vegetarian.
- ChicagoDave 3y ago(apologies for the sarcasm, but) According to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy… A new coding highway was planned years ago. You could have filed a complaint in the Implications of Future AI Department in the basement of Bill Gates’ mansion, but you didn’t. The highway is being constructed and you’re just going to have to deal with it. Here’s some Vogon poetry to make you feel worse and a towel to cry in (only one of its many uses). The guide also suggests gardening as a way to reduce anxiety.
- olalonde 3y agoI'm having a hard time buying that people are genuinely worried about their code being copied without proper attribution. While it is possible for CoPilot to generate copyrighted code, this typically occurs only under intentional efforts and only for a few lines of code. It's just not an actual issue. And something tells me that even if CoPilot would be entirely prevented from doing that, they would still not be happy about CoPilot using their code for training. The copyright issue is just a convenient pretext.
- imjonse 3y agoIs Copilot trained only on github hosted software? What stops them from using sources from codeberg it they wanted to?
- edwinjm 3y agoI you put restrictions like this on your code, then it's no longer open source.
- deelly 3y agoThere is a difference between open source and free.
- quickthrower2 3y agoGNU GPLv3 wants a word. It has way more “restrictions” (restricting one entity to free another)
- phendrenad2 3y agoYou're correct in the common-sense interpretation of the phrase "open source", but unfortunately groups like the Open Source Initiative have redefined it to mean "anything on a list of licenses we approve" I.E. GPL/MIT/BSD. Personally I think that people trying to enforce this definition in online discussions are wasting their time, because it'll never catch on. We should stop trying to make "fetch" happen.
- nologic01 3y agoHow has it come to that? The tech industry has declared in turn that privacy is dead, that labor contracts are dead, that tax obligations are dead and now that copyright is dead. Why is the most promising tool towards a better society appropriated in such a destructive manner? People must separate their fascination with tech as such, from the predominant tech business models that are basically - you can't put lipstick on a pig - parasitic.
- classified 3y agoCopyright is dead only for the little guy. The rich and powerful have their money printing machines copyrighted ad infinitum.
- nologic01 3y agoWhat is puzzling is that its not just the little guy being undermined now. The discussion here is about open source code but take any domain that makes available expert knowledge online. Say medical or financial advice. We are talking about powerful sectors, if not cartels themselves.
- precompute 3y agoIt pays far too much and fat wads of cash are in everyone's mind as these debates surface. "Better for everyone", "human equality", "UBI", yada yada. Debaters then like to name-drop "No true scotsman" and "purity spiralling" for either side. It's just that tech marketing claims it's a small group of technical wizards, while in reality it's the largest novel corporate interest of the last fifty years and it hasn't been about the little guy for decades. The industry is practically vampiric on naive hopefuls. Well, at least some of them get paid.
- thiht 3y agoThis is misguided. What you want is adding a special clause to your license that disallows usage for training LLMs. Whether the code is on GitHub or not, it’ll be used to train models if it’s publicly available and the license allows it.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoThat would make the code not Open Source. What many people actually want is for LLMs to respect Open Source licenses, and propagate those licenses to the derived works they create.
- thiht 3y ago> That would make the code not Open Source. So? Maybe making so much code open source without any restrictions was a mistake in the first place. I know that I don’t want trillion dollars megacorps benefiting from my free open source code in any way. That would include LLM training.
- chrismorgan 3y agoThe contents of the license are irrelevant, because such training is not being done under that license at all (or else it would already be violating it, failing attribution at the least—and it seems likely to be fundamentally impossible to comply, just like a human could not comply if human learning was subject to such licenses). It’s depending upon copyright restrictions not applying to it (under “fair use” doctrine).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Phiwise_ 3y agoAh yes. More "Free" as in "Do As You're Told" from people who call their source more open than anyone else's. Coming up on a decade later, and if anything we have more to learn: https://marktarver.com/free-as-in-do-as-your-told.html https://marktarver.com/free-as-in-do-as-your-told.html
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThat's an interesting PoV. I hadn't thought of it. But I don't know how much success the author will have, in his endeavor. The horses have fled. Closing the barn doors, does nothing. The Rubicon has been crossed. The die is cast. Iacta alea est, etc.
- ChatGTP 3y agoWell not really, code is living and breathing and changing so if we updated all licenses today to forbid the use of code to train llms which will be used in a proprietary setting it would be fine?
- golergka 3y agoCopilot and other code-authoring LLMs are one of the biggest innovations in software engineering in recent years. I use it daily and can't imagine going back to work without it — adopting it in 2021 was the same shock of a productivity boost as when I learned vim. Yes, I know that it can occasionally break license by producing licensed code verbatim. But in my almost 2 years of using it daily I have never seen it happen first-hand, and I don't see how this licence infringement could actually do any significant damage to anyone — so while I acknowledge that this problem exist, I refuse to accept that it's as significant enough as people make it out to be. For a long time, it seemed like technical progress in computing have stopped, and now that AIs and LLMs are finally bringing exciting new technology to life, it's very sad to see exactly the people that should be excited and inspired about it — software engineers — fighting against it.
- smusamashah 3y agoWhy HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? Both are generative softwares which when generate a piece verbatim only means over fitting / over training on that particular example. The tone on one of these tools is hypocritical. When it comes to digital art general sentiment is that it's inevitable and artists need to up their game. This sentiment is not being repeated for code generators.
- psychphysic 3y ago100% everyone wants to do away with everyone else.
- earthnail 3y agoBecause digital art is trained on the end result. The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Learning from source code is like learning from Photoshop files or Logic projects. Artists usually do not share them. In music, not even the labels get anything than the final mixdown (the music equivalent of the binary); the stems or projects remain with the studio - just like the source code in software projects tends to remain with the studios. In software, we started showing and sharing source code under the assumption that it makes other humans making software better. People still rarely do this in music, as holding up industry secrets is deemed more important than fostering a community of personal growth. We don't open source our code so an AI can grow. We do it so that humans can grow. There's no need to publish our code to distribute our final binary. This breaks the common understanding of why it's a good idea to share your source code, and as a result, people might become more protective of their code again. In many ways, your comment is similar to all the comments saying "but you open-sourced it, surely you must know that people will then put it in their commercial code?"
- kajaktum 3y agoPeople share arts because they want to help other humans grow too, not the AI. Also the code is the end product. Similarly, artists don't share their project file because it’s not the point. This is like saying programmers not sharing their vim macros.
- dathinab 3y agoDue to their TOS I believe it's illegal to upload any code you don't have full rights for to GitHub (if it wasn't already uploaded by someone who has full rights for it, which isn't the same as it already being on github). This is even true for e.g. MIT licenses as while they are very permissive they still require a form of attributions which Copilot doesn't provide. Also for anyone arguing that such ML models "lern", at least the moment they are not exatcly perfect sized or sized below that they are basically guaranteed to verbatime encode partial copies of code, it's fundamental consequence of their design. And while this encoding is "encoded" in some way it's not transformative in the definition of copyright law AFIK. I.e. any big model net is guaranteed to commit hard to trace copyright infringement.
- masukomi 3y agoYou have the full rights to upload any open source code. The entire point of an open source license is to give others the rights to do what they want with it. Unless the license has a specific exclusion for github or github like services, you definitely have that right. > This is even true for e.g. MIT licenses as while they are very permissive they still require a form of attributions which Copilot doesn't provide. those two things have nothing to do with each other. MIT gives me the license to upload. Copilot NOT giving me the license is irrelevant because the generated code isn't distributed under under an opensource license and thus has no relevance to the discussion of MIT or any other Open Source license. additionally, requiring attribution and having the right to upload it are separate things. A license MAY require attribution and it may not. Rights can be granted without such a thing. See Public Domain, and CC0 for examples.
- dathinab 3y agono, you agree to give certain rights to GitHub when you upload. Rights you do not have with most open source licenses because they do require attribution. > generated code isn't distributed under under an opensource license you still have to comply with licenses and if code pilot spits out code which contains nearly verbatim code which was MIT licensed it is not copilot which needs to grant you the license but the original code owner (or you need to at least properly attribute it, through in case of e.g. GPL that is not enough) but through the act of emitting code via code pilot github does distribute code (without proper attribution) and they do so by getting rights from the uploader to be able to do so. Except that most people uploadig do not have such rights for anything which isn't their code.
- newswasboring 3y agoSo many copyleft people writing about their copyrights feels... weird.
- mnky9800n 3y agoYou could make this into an addendum of whatever license you want no? That way your license includes both reuse and attribution and also, you are not allowed to upload to GitHub.
- nottorp 3y agoHmm a thought. With neural networks it's impossible to actually describe what the network does. Including proving that it has or has not used GPLed code for a certain input/output set. One could argue that all code output is GPL with the associated restrictions unless said network has provably never been trained on GPLed code.
- nikitos_vv 3y agoCopyright regulation for intellectual property should not exist.
- prirun 3y agoIt's ironic that the movie studios want license agreements for content they own to cover distinct uses (streaming vs DVD's for example), yet they expect actors to agree to allow their voice, likeness, mannerisms, etc. to be usable by an AI for future projects (only the studio's own projects of course!). If I own "the thing", I want you to pay for each new, distinct kind of use for it. But if it's your thing I want to use, I want you to have a permissive license.
- machina_ex_deus 3y agoI think the concept of open source should simply extend to AI models. I'm fine with AI being trained on open source code, if the entire model is also released as open source. We need GPL analog to AI training - license that allows you training models, but only if they are released as open source. An infective AI training license.
- knallfrosch 3y agoIsn't GPL the toxic stuff that real projects avoid like the plague?
- aezart 3y agoThe funniest outcome of all this would be a ruling that the entire copilot model is GPL.
- version_five 3y agoDon't share and license your code permissively then. People want the benefits of publicly sharing stuff, but then they want to prohibit others from learning from what they share. There are many options to keep things private. The downside is that you won't get the same exposure.
- truculent 3y agoAdultery isn't illegal, but I might fairly consider someone engaging in it without their partner's consent to be in the wrong.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago"No Adultery" is typically a term of entering a relationship. We can liken that to code licensing. Cheating is explicitly established as being _against_ the ad-hoc contract of the relationship. Conversely, open source licenses explicitly state that an end-user may further distribute that source code to anywhere they wish.
- truculent 3y agoThis person is adding their "No GitHub" term with this blog post.
- eloisius 3y agoCopilot was not only trained on permissively licensed code. It’s trained on all public repos, even if the code is copyrighted (which is the default absent a more permissive license)
- TomOwens 3y agoIf the copyrighted code was uploaded to GitHub by the owner, there's no problem with this. When you upload code to GitHub, one of the rights that you grant to GitHub is the right to use your content for "improving the Service over time". See D.4. License Grant to Us in the GitHub Terms of Service. Once it is up there, you also grant other users certain rights, like viewing public repos and forking repos into their own copies. See D.5. License Grant to Other Users. Even with the most restrictive protections in place, using GitHub requires you to give up certain rights. A question would be if creating and training Copilot is "improving the Service over time". I would suspect that it would be, though. There are still some open questions around what happens when Copilot suggests code verbatim, but these are mostly for the users of Copilot. Although I would hope that GitHub is thinking about offering information to ensure that users understand the source of code they use, if it may be protected, and what licenses it may be offered under. There are still some interesting legal questions here, but I don't think that the training of Copilot is one of them. A more interesting question would be what GitHub does if someone uploads someone else's copyright-protected code to GitHub and it is used for training Copilot before it is removed. If you don't own the copyright, you can't grant GitHub the rights needed to use that code for anything, including improving the service.
- seqizz 3y agoAs far as I know, rights and licenses don't work with suggestions like "please". Either embed it in your COPYING/LICENSE files so the initial 'uploading to github' action would be illegal, or take legal action agains the main offender (which, in this case GitHub).
- l0ngyap 3y ago[dead]
- masukomi 3y agoWhile I understand the author's concern, it seems a bit naïve to assume that Microsoft would ONLY learn from code in GitHub. Geek blogs are spectacular places to ingest code from because they give a ton of context and explanations for what's going on. Way more than raw source code ever does. If you want an AI to understand what's happening in code via the English phrases you use to describe what you want then you _need_ to train it on code that has similar English phrases describing what it's doing. Ingesting from public sources outside of GitHub will just become more necessary as they work to improve these things.
- alfor 3y agoCopyright laws do not apply. It’s trained intelligence, in a similar way as human intelligence. If you apply copyright laws to LLM you should apply them to human intelligence too as it’s the same process (with a different scale) Yes programming is going away, so is most intellectual and artistics tasks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- PaulKeeble 3y agoOne relatively simple answer is to just add to the license the term that it nor its derivative works can not be uploaded to Github or be used to train any AI. It will be wildly breached because no one cares about the license but it does at least give you some legal recourse if you choose to pursue it. You aren't required to just use GPL V2-3 you can amend the terms however you wish.
- suprjami 3y agoTo avoid the proliferation of a million different licenses, it would be better to have a single or few "No GitHub" licenses. Such a license would not be considered "open" by the OSI because it imposes onerous conditions. Even if they were made, I wonder how much such licenses would be used. If the permissive people don't like copyleft because of the conditions it imposes, they must hate this. Likewise the copyleft folks want freedom enforced, not taken away.
- cpdean 3y ago> Even if a project is not hosted on GitHub, other people have the legal right (depending on the license) to redistribute the source code. It means that they have the right to share the code of others on GitHub, as long as they respect the terms of license. This is totally legal. But then, Copilot will be able to analyze the code and violates the license terms, which isn’t. While encouraging people to not distribute code via Github may mitigate the issue some, the actual issue is how Github has mass-automated the process of violating open source licenses. Github should pay a fine for every suggestion Copilot produces that violates a software license, plain and simple. Don't blame the people that unknowingly upload code to the training dataset.
- jimmy2020 3y agoThere should be a new open-source license specifically designed to restrict the use of code for commercial purposes, whether it involves training machine learning models or not. It could be similar to GPL but tailored specifically for the field of machine learning, ensuring that the code cannot be utilized for ML commercial purposes or trained without limitation.
- FrozenSynapse 3y agoWhy?! Why restrict the advancement of a field? Most of the times the code uploaded to github came from another source (not original content, very little code is original). Nobody can stop this anymore. If it's not github that's only taking code from their own platform, there will come others that scrape the internet and use everything, just like MidJourney. Embrace it. I'm more against Art AI generators, because they produce end results and will fully replace the need to know how to draw. Copilot is just providing simple snippets, it's not thinking for you, so it won't replace the engineers completely, at least for now.
- jimmy2020 3y agoStill, it's good to be an option. If you see this as an advancement you can choose something like MIT if you don't like your code to be trained by a paid copilot then you can choose something like MIT-Human only. It's a better solution than don't use GitHub at all. And whether we like it or not, a new license should be introduced to address the new data model.
- layer8 3y agoPeople aren’t necessarily opposed to commercial use (which many licenses allow), but are upset that license terms like attribution requirements are completely being ignored by Microsoft/Github, turning Copilot into a sort of laundering machine for open-source content.
- jimmy2020 3y agoThat's what I am trying to say. Personally, I don't mind if my code is being used for commercial or not. I do mind when Microsoft uses my code without a reference and asks me to pay for copilot just because they decided to put it behind a paywall.
- datavirtue 3y agoThe ship has sailed and the cat is out of the bag. By the time any of this shakes out everyone will be using copilot and the lawyers will have ground any argument into dust. Good luck putting it back in the bag. After you have cleaned everything off of GitHub and separated yourself from the ecosystem it (AI bots) will be everywhere and your code gobbled up again. The only thing that is worth a fuck is a working product. Not your boilerplate or fancy snippets that you want to claim ownership over so as to stop the evil Microsoft from benefitting the community. Are we devs or luddites?
- phendrenad2 3y agoI think it's very common for developers to overestimate the value of their own code. You see this in the video game community, where people are afraid to open-source their Minecraft plugin because they think it'll be "stolen". They choose the future where nobody builds on their plugin (and no amount of attribution will ever feel like enough, so there's some level of "theft" felt by the original author). Most open-source projects are not valuable, and even if they are popular, they could be easily replaced in a few days by another programmer. And usually the license doesn't matter, because nobody forks the project anyway, all development is done in a central repository and the project owner signs off on all of it
- karmakaze 3y ago> But then, Copilot will be able to analyze the code and violates the license terms, which isn’t. I'm not sure about this. In most cases the result would be similar to a human reading a lot of opensource and later when writing use patterns that they'd learned. It's only in the edge cases where there's clear 'plagiarism' on a niche prompt that it would be problematic. An more direct solution isn't to take everything off GitHub, but rather to not allow Copilot to do near-literal copy/paste. If we moved opensource to BitBucket, there's no protection that it wouldn't do the same as Copilot. Attack the problem directly. A way to think of this banner is that of signing a publicly visible petition to make Copilot behave as humans abiding to licenses do.
- firstlink 3y ago> It means that they have the right to share the code of others on GitHub, as long as they respect the terms of license. This is totally legal. But then, Copilot will be able to analyze the code and violates the license terms, which isn’t. Both claims here are incorrect even though pretty much everyone gets this wrong. When someone who has obtained the right to redistribute some code only under the GPL uploads it to GitHub, that person (and that person only) violates the terms of the GPL. The GPL requires further redistribution only under its own terms, but uploads to GitHub come with a grant of a too-permissive license that a GPL licensee does not have the right to grant. When GitHub proceeds to use the uploaded code to train copilot, they (probably) are abiding by the terms of this new license they have been (fraudulently) granted. They are not bound by the GPL, that's not how licenses work: they've got the other one. Now, GitHub has a big weakness here which is that they ought to know they're being granted licenses that the putative licensors have no right to grant. But that still would not make them in violation of the GPL, just of the original copyright.
- meghan_rain 3y ago> They are not bound by the GPL but they are bound by the original copyright and are in violation of it
- janeway 3y agoIt sucks that people will be out of commission once AI can do the same work basically for free. For years I have always felt that with more tax and a sort of “freedom fund” more people will be able to make “free” stuff in public for the global good. The only way to get there is to stop paying for stuff such that we eventually get to a utopian future as seen in Star Trek. Although the intervening period would be chaotic. For example, we pay tolls on some roads but we don’t pay cash every time we want to walk down the street - that idea sounds crazy. Likewise, if we could support the work of creators with UBI then we could all enjoy free software, media, books, etc. I know I would keep creating, because I love it. But for now the middleman wants to get his share so it seems sensible that we must pay companies for their produce directly. To be even more extreme, a _lot_ of people think if anything is public, it is fair gain to consume and reuse. If you didn’t have to worry about getting paid, would you care about someone enjoying and using your work? Perhaps the opposite - that would be your motivation.
- falleng0d 3y agoWhat is stopping Github from crawling whatever other Open source platform you choose? I don't think this will fix anything. Actually developers are the only ones that stand to lose here since now open source will be spread on multiple platforms, making it harder to find what you want
- xigoi 3y ago> What is stopping Github from crawling whatever other Open source platform you choose? At the very least, they can't claim that you gave them special rights through the terms of service. Also, rate limiting.
- prosim 3y agoWhere does OpenAI state that they only train ChatGPT-3.5 or GPT-4 on code from GitHub? The model for GitHub Copilot X clearly has a (human) language understanding that you can't get from source code (or source code comments), so they are trained on much more data than GitHub has and there is no reason to believe OpenAI would limit themselves to that.
- JohnFen 3y agoThis seems like a very reasonable position to me, but they should add the restriction to their licensing rather than just nicely asking other devs to pretty-please don't do this. Although I don't use github (for reasons unrelated to to copilot), public access to my code was eliminated when I took my websites down while I look for a way to deal with AI scraping. I'm eagerly watching what others do, hoping that someone will have a great idea of how to deal with this before I do.
- kjgkjhfkjf 3y agoSeems like Github should train one LLM per license type. There'd be a GPL LLM that's trained on GPL code, an MIT LLM trained on MIT licensed code, etc. Then Copilot users could select the LLM for a license appropriate for the work they're doing.
- juliangmp 3y agoHonestly I think we should explicitly forbid using the material as training data in our Foss licenses. Unless the weights and the network model are made public I dont want any of my code to contribute to such an AI.
- juanpicardo 3y agoI wonder if we will start seeing Open Source licenses that explicitly forbid using code for model trainings.
- Aissen 3y agoThanks to github code search, I found at least on project which has this badge that someone decided to upload to github anyway.
- lakomen 3y agoAll the people wanting to profit off other people's work for free sind arguing in favor of Microsoft. Crypto bros are now AI bros huh?
- nullbyte808 3y agoI don't understand why people freak out about their code being used by others when they publicly release it. Is it lack of attribution? Does attribution really do anything if your not already famous? If you don't want your code known, don't make it open-source.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _heimdall 3y agoI think the main complaint behind it is that a massive corporation is using code and blatantly ignoring the software licenses. It's one thing when individual devs or small teams don't respect a software license, ideally everyone would understand and follow them but that's not realistic. When Microsoft damn well understands the licenses and ignores them to train an AI and sell a product, that's pretty damn egregious.
- sharperguy 3y agoThe issue I have here is that if these kind of criticisms start to take hold, it will perfectly pave a path for these same corporations to have more power handed to them. If more laws get passed requiring stringent restrictions on training data, tests to prove that copyrighted works cannot be produced by your model etc, this makes open source models which could potentially compete with these corporate models much more risky and expensive to develop.
- _heimdall 3y agoWell I wouldn't actually mind it being more difficult or impossible for these LLMs to be developed at all, but that's a whole different discussion!
- arp242 3y agoMicrosoft doesn't "ignore" the license, there is a disagreement on what the license and copyright actually mandates. Those are quite different things. Given the current state of the law and how licenses are written it's impossible declare that "yes, this is absolutely illegal". People may not like it, and (arguably) it may go against the spirit, but that is also a very different thing. Right now the situation is just ambiguous and unclear. All of this absolutely matters, because the solution to "Microsoft is acting illegally" is a lawsuit (which, I believe, is already underway) while the solution to "the license and law is unclear" is different licences and/or laws. The solutions are completely different.
- VoxPelli 3y agoThis assumes that GitHub Copilot only gets its data from GitHub and that GitHub Copilot is unique among tools. Remember the old saying: Anything published on the internet stays on the internet. What prohibits someone from crawling code from other sites and building a GitHub Copilot equivalent? Considering how ChatGPT style bots are often trained on public websites that is likely to already be true even.
- throw9away6 3y agoAi is like the tornado cash of copyright infringement and ip theft. It’s a mixer that exists to skirt existing law