3 ms·

Because he copied the source code or at least had it for reference all over the room he was coding in?

• mattnewton 3y ago
  Right, and if you do that, it’s theft under the law because we want to reward people for doing novel work. In the same way if I could get GitHub to send me a copy of your private proprietary repository without your consent, that would be called theft by the law, because it removes the incentive to invest in proprietary software. If I hire one of the engineers who worked in that repository and spent years on the problem so she could code solutions to it in their sleep that’s not theft in the law, because we value labor rights, the free exchange of ideas, and want to incentivize building up human capital. Even as it creates a new risk people investing in proprietary software have to deal with now. If I hire “software” that learned from a copy written source, but doesn’t reproduce the copywritten code directly, why is that different from hiring someone who worked on that project before? I think morality isn’t a useful compass here, it isn’t a moral problem. It’s a problem of what kinds of rules you want for society to increase utility for everyone around these tools. If you restrict learning from each other too much you stifle progress. If you make it too easy to copy the leader in a field you disincentivize anyone doing novel research first.