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I'm really getting tired of lawyers, and collectively our "inner-lawyer", poo-pooing this merely for licensing and GPL issues, neither of which have any practical implication on anything a software engineer does.

All this "controversy" around Copilot just reeks of a kind of technological "social justice" that most people didn't sign up for but seem happy to sit, watch, and commiserate on.

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> poo-pooing this merely for licensing and GPL issues

People want to use it, but are extremely worried about getting in hot water for using it. Thats no idle concern.

It’s very reasonable to ban its use within a company given the legal limbo.

>given the legal limbo

Exactly.

I very much assert that the legal, economic, and social context in which a programmer operates has a great impact on what the programmer produces. We established the licenses we have for good reasons. Licenses alter all of the above variables. We are not simply code production machines. We make code for reasons.

You are free to view yourself as a code production machine, where what you produce is independent of the situation before and after you make anything, but many of us would like to take ownership and action on the legal, economic, and social planes with our work.

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