I’m really dumbfounded by the Copilot team decision to not exclude GPL licensed code.
Why was this direction chosen? Is the inclusion of GPL really worth the risk and potential Google v. Oracle lawsuit? I’d like to know the reasoning.
Why was this direction chosen? Is the inclusion of GPL really worth the risk and potential Google v. Oracle lawsuit? I’d like to know the reasoning.
Btw the GPLv2 death penalty is rather unique and I don't think anyone will deny that including GPL code in proprietary code is a hell of a lot worse in every way (liability, ethically, etc) than including permissively licenced code and forgetting to attribute it
Copilot isn't copying, it's regurgitating patterns from its training dataset. The result may be subject to a license you don't know about, but modified enough that you won't find the original source. The result can be a blend of multiple snippets with varying licenses. And there's no way to extract attribution from Copilot - DNN models can give you an output for your input, they can't tell you which exact parts of the training dataset were used to generate that output.
When a person gets code from another source on the internet, they generally know where the code has come from.
What you get paid is to write your own code. When you write your own code, generally you think first and then type. Well, with Copilot you think first and then start typing a few symbols before seeing automatic suggestions. If they are right, you accept changes and if they happen to be similar to any other code out there, you deal with it exactly the same as if you typed those lines yourself.
If you happen to type code that is similar to copyright code, that is generally considered legally OK.
If you copypaste copyrighted code, that is not legally OK.
If you accept that same code from an autocomplete tool, that can easily be seen as equivalent to the latter case rather than the former.
That's more Trainee than Copilot.
Excluding GPL does not solve the problem.
They could try to trace every single code snippet they train on to its "true source" and use the license for that, but that's not very well-defined, and is a lot harder, and it's never going to be 100%.
To use the old trope — if the majority of programmers can't implement Fizzbuzz, but they do have a Github profile, are they being included too?
Hopefully there's some quality bar for the training set, i.e. some subset of "good" code (e.g. release candidate tags from fairly established OSS tools/frameworks in different languages) rather than any old code on the internet.
> Once, GitHub Copilot suggested starting an empty file with something it had even seen more than a whopping 700,000 different times during training -- that was the GNU General Public License.
https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...