Feels like everyone is missing the point: Copilot will ultimately serve to weaken the arguments in support of software patents and copyright.
That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
That can only be a good thing for society (though perhaps not for rent seekers).
I am reminded of a line from Terry Pratchett's Going Postal in relation to a hacker-like organization called the Smoking GNU, "...[A]ll property is theft, except mine...", which I thought was rather painfully apt in describing what FOSS evolved into after becoming popular.
"No restrictions" has never been the goal and to claim that they're egoistic hypocrites who are just scared for their own livelihood because of this is just an absurd strawman.
Are you sure you're in a position to be saying things like that? The closed source Xerox printer driver incident is generally viewed as the origin of RMS's thinking on Free Software, not the Symbolics incident. And, as others have pointed out, you were mistaken even on the particulars of that.
As for Free Software not being about no restrictions, may I remind you of the four freedoms that are at the heart of the Free Software philosophy? Copilot runs afoul of none of them and I would go so far as to say that Copilot is an embodiment of 1 through 3.
"A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
Again, the GPL is a tool to achieve the Free Software philosophy, not the end goal.
Symbolics had a license for MIT's Lisp system.
Anyway, that still wouldn't change that the FSF and Copyleft are explicitly anti-proprietary, not intending to be 'no restrictions'.
Indeed. Everybody is a leet haxors when they're 14, it's 1998, and we're vying for +o in #warez on DALnet. We believed information really did "want to be free".
Unfortunately some of those same kids grew up to create today's data barons and that old saying about getting someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding comes into play.
As such I really don't understand why so many people are saying things like you have said here. These people believing in free software, including the original intent of the GPL to be a tool against copyright, does not mean they should, or would, be all for co-pilot, a non-free product by a company that once spat in the face of free software (and likely still does behind closed doors), who is using their free software, including the GPLed works, to create a non-free software.
As such, even if it ends up being legal from a license standpoint, it really feels like copyleft is being taken advantage of and exploited because nothing is given back in return (even if copilot remained free of charge, that's hardly giving back in foss lingo). So I suppose it's more a moral and intent thing rather than a legal thing at this point, unless copyright law decides copilot is a derivative work (doubtful, personally).
> Unless my recollection is off, the GPL was never the goal of the original Free Software movement; it was merely a tool to get to the end state where all code becomes available for use by anyone for any reason without cost or restriction.
Yes, but the GPL was created for a world with copyright to step towards a world without it. However we are extremely far away from such a world, and I don't see how copilot helps step towards it at all. I just don't see the argument. It just results in code that will be used potentially wrongly in copyrighted works, proprietary or not. And all of this is enabled by, as I mentioned, a non-free software created by Microsoft, who have used their huge capital to gain access to a proprietary AI by throwing money at it. Nothing about it seems fair even if it ends up all being legal in copyright terms.
[0] I'm seeing a lot of people in these threads who don't know the definition of free software or open source. Free software referes to free as in freedom, not free as in 'free beer' (gratis). Of course, free software is still often gratis, but you can still monetize it in various ways.
Your recollection seems to be completely off. That wasn't the goal of the Free Software movement.
Also, the code they champion comes with restrictions and, optionally, cost. So again, you're off.
I think a lot more people on this site (and in the FOSS community in general) would be on board with Copilot if it respected viral licenses, e.g. if it had a way of inferring that the code it was copying verbatim were GPL-3 and warned the user that including it in their project would require them to GPL-3 their project as well.
As it stands, the combined inputs leaves the model in the most murky of gray areas.
Now 'the edge' is already mostly open source. All the lock-in and value has moved into either infrastructure or in software you don't even get to touch since it runs in the Cloud and you just provide IO to it.
Endless security breaches will encourage firms to do “less IT” themselves and accelerate the adoption of SaaS solutions (and PaaS, with no/low-code etc.)
Also, perhaps not a massive driver but still, not for nothing: M1-style processing innovation (ARM) will see more developers creating for ARM servers, because they can, which will almost exclusively be run by the hyper scale cloud providers.
And I notice you didn't say anything about patents?