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What a ridiculous article. Copilot does not violate antitrust law. GitHub is not a monopoly just because open source devs choose to host there. Devs are free to

by 19h 3y ago

What a ridiculous article. Copilot does not violate antitrust law. GitHub is not a monopoly just because open source devs choose to host there. Devs are free to use GitLab or whatever. Comparing this to Google Books is silly. Google stole copyrighted books. Copilot uses freely shared open source code. No copyright issue. The article claims "Open source code on GitHub might be thought of as 'open and freely accessible' but it is not." Lol what? The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse. Copilot can absolutely use open source data. This is typical hype and FUD. No evidence Copilot even used all of GitHub's data or violated any licenses. Baseless speculation. There's no real antitrust argument here. Nothing to see, move along. yawn

tpxl 3y ago
> The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse > No evidence Copilot [...] violated any licenses Both of these allow redistribution _if you include the license_. Copilot doesn't include any licenses in the code it distributes. You can argue whether that's fair use or not, but you can't argue that it doesn't respect the license.
- 19h 3y ago
  You can configure Copilot to not return code that appears verbatim in public repositories. In that case it at least won't produce code you could legitimately argue would be covered by any individuals' specific license.
  - Liquid_Fire 3y ago
    But it might well give you the exact same code with a variable name changed (for example), which would be unlikely to hold up in court if a human had done it to bypass the license.
    - pelasaco 3y ago
      you are assuming some imaginative scenario. "Hold up" in court. It will never happen. Just check how many ways you have to write a method to check if a number is odd or not. If you are using a application using a framework, pretty sure all codes looks similar. Look a ruby on rails application for example. Quite often, the user model, session controller and in some level, all controllers if they are following the "rails way" they look very similar.
    - williamcotton 3y ago
      It depends on the code. You can’t copyright something functional like a for-loop. What you can copyright is the larger expressive, and arbitrary, structure of that code. Copyright is not meant for utilitarian purposes. For that there are patents. The non-utilitarian, artistically expressive aspect of software is in how code is organized. You know, the rather arbitrary decisions that spawn hours of bike-shedding. Copilot is most useful when it makes no creative decisions and instead follows the style and design patterns already established in the code base.
justinclift 3y ago
With the AGPL3 license requiring derivatives operating over a network to disclose their source code (my rough summarisation), does that mean GitHub Copilot should be publishing its source code publicly somewhere?

by 19h 3y ago

tpxl 3y ago

> The MIT and Apache licenses explicitly allow reuse > No evidence Copilot [...] violated any licenses Both of these allow redistribution _if you include the license_. Copilot doesn't include any licenses in the code it distributes. You can argue whether that's fair use or not, but you can't argue that it doesn't respect the license.

19h 3y ago
You can configure Copilot to not return code that appears verbatim in public repositories. In that case it at least won't produce code you could legitimately argue would be covered by any individuals' specific license.
- Liquid_Fire 3y ago
  But it might well give you the exact same code with a variable name changed (for example), which would be unlikely to hold up in court if a human had done it to bypass the license.
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    you are assuming some imaginative scenario. "Hold up" in court. It will never happen. Just check how many ways you have to write a method to check if a number is odd or not. If you are using a application using a framework, pretty sure all codes looks similar. Look a ruby on rails application for example. Quite often, the user model, session controller and in some level, all controllers if they are following the "rails way" they look very similar.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    It depends on the code. You can’t copyright something functional like a for-loop. What you can copyright is the larger expressive, and arbitrary, structure of that code. Copyright is not meant for utilitarian purposes. For that there are patents. The non-utilitarian, artistically expressive aspect of software is in how code is organized. You know, the rather arbitrary decisions that spawn hours of bike-shedding. Copilot is most useful when it makes no creative decisions and instead follows the style and design patterns already established in the code base.

justinclift 3y ago

With the AGPL3 license requiring derivatives operating over a network to disclose their source code (my rough summarisation), does that mean GitHub Copilot should be publishing its source code publicly somewhere?