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Comment by m00x | Hacker News Reader

Get a lawyer since this is nonsense.

It's literally the standard BSD 2-Clause License, word for word, with an additional third clause:

  3. Use in source or binary forms for the construction or operation
     of predictive software generation systems is prohibited.

Hardly nonsense, but obviously you aren't equipped to judge. More about the BSD licenses:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

Yes, that added clause is nonsense. On top of being nonsense, there is significant precedent.

Remember the lawsuit of HiQ labs vs LinkedIn? Scraping, or viewing public data on a public webpage is legal.

https://gizmodo.com/linkedin-scraping-data-legal-court-case-...

If the GPL can defeat Copilot, we need an more permissive MIT/BSD-style license to do the same.

This does seem like a pretty compelling rebuttal, since the preceding comment suggests that GPL does nothing to Microsoft's ability to incorporate code into Copilot's model.

How would you ever prove the parameters of a model were generated by specific training data? Couldn't multiple sets of training data produce the same embeddings/parameters? I imagine there could be infinite possible sets of training data that would lead to the same results, depending on the type of predictive software.

Is it? A similarly casual clause in the OCB license prevented OCB from being used by the military for many years (granted, it prevented OCB from being used almost everywhere else, too).

I have no idea if this license language works or doesn't, but this is hardly the least productive subthread on this story. It's concrete and specific, and we can learn stuff from it.

OCB is a fun case study because they later granted an exception for OpenSSL, but only for software literally named OpenSSL.

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