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Comment by markphip | Hacker News Reader

Other than the SCO Unix/Linux suit, I cannot recall OSS license discussions around a few lines of code. It usually seems to be about direct usage of OSS libraries or applications. That is why I cannot get too worked up about Copilot yet. Just practically speaking, it seems like the scope of what it would do is pretty minor.

So my answer to this question, would be No.

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The problem I have with it isn't the few lines of code it generates, its the ingestion of the millions of repos from millions of devs, creating an AI model from that free code, and then charging for the product. I'm already a paying customer, I should get free access this thing that was built on free code and free labor that gives absolutely no attribution to the original authors.

my side concern (which may be overblown) is that this is the first step to completely replacing programmers and consolidating finances and power even further.

Edit:

additionally, I'm concerned about the "Death" of open source as in: if Microsoft can violate these licenses, what trust remains in the licenses? If people put restrictive licenses on their open source libraries, and now they know these can be violated, will they continue to support open source? And if so, what is the point of the license to begin with?

IANAL, but at this time, I do not see how any of the licenses have been violated. I guess we will learn more if someone steps up to challenge that. That seems to be the inflection point in your argument that makes it hard to discuss where you want to take this.

Going back to an earlier point, we do not know all of the analysis that has been done, whether academic or commercial, by examining open source code. Whether it is on issues of code quality or style, velocity, fix rates etc. Are all of those things also violating the license if that analysis leads to commercial success? What of GitHub itself and how it has improved or based features on what it learns from open source projects and how they use the service?

At this time, from what I have seen so far, I fail to see what is so different or special about Copilot. It did not illegally obtain the source code it used to train the model. Whether using the code to train the model is illegal itself, is another question but if it is then what other uses of the source code are illegal?

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