I’ve looked at some of the Copilot threads but am unable to follow the issue. Can someone summarize what the issue is with Copilot and why a BSD license would have been significant for the code?
https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128?lang=en
2. Someone posted how copilot reproduced the famous fast inverse square root function verbatim, including comments.
Microsoft already launders open source code by just hiring people in China and Romania to rewrite it. Copilot is their engineering culture distilled. However most big companies do this.
Framing it like this makes it sound like a problem with the GPL in particular, when really it's a problem for anything (including ingested code with no discernable license) that isn't expressly available under permissive licenses--more permissive than even the BSDs or MIT license, which after all, still require attribution by way of reproducing any copyright notices and distributing the text of the license itself.
The only terms where this isn't really a problem is limited to basically WTFPL and public domain code.
3. Microsoft decided to exclude proprietary code from copilot learning date. If they were concerned that copilot's output might infringe on other companies proprietary code, they should have the same concerns about free and open source licensed code.
I don’t see how the GPL is special in the discussion around Copilot.
For BSD licensed code, you must reproduce the license and attribution for that code, but the rest of the code can be licensed as you want. For GPL code there are additional requirements.
GPL is is Open Source but for you to benefit, you have to make derivative works GPL.
BSD is Open Source and you can close derivatives so that you benefit and you don't have to share back.
I'm not sure how you don't see how an auto-suggest tool that inserts GPL code into yours is different to BSD.
This means that authors of BSD licensed code have their rights violated to the same degree as those of GPL licensed code.
The default shouldn't be "you can violate people's licenses until you notice or get caught". Sure, in practice it probably won't cause anyone legal trouble: it would be really hard for, say, the author of some BSD-licensed code to prove that a user of Copilot actually caused them monetary damages by not providing attribution.
But this isn't really a world I want to live in; we shouldn't treat other people's work with such entitlement. Copilot should be able to trace the provenance of a suggestion it makes, and notify the author of their licensing obligations.
If that's not possible, then Copilot should not exist.
All AIs are trained on copyrighted data scraped from the internet. What you guys want effectively amounts to making most AI illegal. At least outside of big tech companies with large private datasets. Is that the world you prefer to live in?
Github and Microsoft should have trained it on their own code because they could make it public domain. Using other peoples code with various licences and many different requirements is just going to be a complete shitshow.
The point was that you can fix attribution errors pretty simply once they are uncovered, its a lot harder to pull GPL code out of your project to prevent you from having to relicence.
It doesn't sound like it is fit for purpose.
This is not exactly true, GPL is not magic that automatically re-licenses your code behind your back. What actually happens is your are in violation of the GPL , one way to solve the violation is that you re-license your code (so you have to do it, it is not happening behind your back automatically). I am not aware of any case where someone did not want to GPL the software and a judge forced him to do it. This kind of problems are also happening with proprietary license, some developer copy-pastes some properietary code and in the end you have to make ti right remove the code and make a deal with the party you damaged.
> The C compiler in use at the time was GCC, which was released under the GPL. To avoid the restrictions of this code, NeXT provided its front end as a library that end users would link against GCC, thereby avoiding the GPL (which only applies to distribution of the software, not how you use it). This little legal maneuver didn't work, however, so NeXT was forced to release the code.
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
"Alsup did agree with the jury that the rangeCheck function and eight security files were a copyright infringement, but the only relief available was statutory damages up to a maximum of US$150,000"
So your argument is exactly my point, the license is not infecting your product, you have to pay damages or in case of GPL you have the OPTION to comply with the license and release the code.
Again, copy -pasting some GPL code is not magicaly transforming your other code into GPL. Or the reverse copy pasting some Oracle/Microsoft or Google code in yoru project does not make your project Oracle or MS property.
> However, in this case, Donald writes, "with Cisco, years of trying to work through their predecessor's compliance problems didn't generate the progress we were hoping for, so we had filed a lawsuit. It was quickly settled, and compliance was achieved." > > There’s an even brighter silver lining to this story: Cisco later became a contributor to the GNU Project. "It really is a success story in bringing a violator into the free software community," Donald wrote.
For a proprietary code, it doesn't work because a commercial company is looking for profit.
So you would prefer you had by mistake infringed on MS/Google or Oracle code then some dude's GPL shitty left pad ? For me it seems that the license is not important but who exactly you upset.
Anyway the point is the license did not infected Google code, Google had to pay damages and it could have been GPL or other proprietary license.
The answer becomes more interesting if you could use them as input to an AI that generates source code (beyond Copilot).
(Apologies if this has been discussed recently.)