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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

> People are probably angry because this is yet another case of a big multinational corporation abusing unclear or difficult to enforce legislation for profit.

it's worse than that: it's Microsoft trying to completely undermine the concept of open source

meanwhile: they're unaffected as their high-value proprietary code remains private and doesn't train the model

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Finally the angle for Microsoft buying GitHub becomes clear.

There is zero rationale why Microsoft could not do it without buying GitHub. Hell, they could have trained the model from GitLab or Bitbucket public repos.

They need developer mindshare and they lost a lot of developers in the 2000s. Buying GitHub (and being involved in 100s of projects) brings this mindset of Microsoft as a developer company back to developers. Like as an advertisement platform/branding for some novel technology like this CoPilot.

It was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment. It’s very unlikely they were even planning this when they bought GitHub. While you’re completely right about their rationale, a lot of people were at the time concerned about the acquisition, and it feels now a bit short sighted to burn all the good will they have generated by an act like this which undermines open source.

I don’t even think most people care about open source code. What if they’re reading private repos as well? The only option to escape this is to leave github. Which I’m kinda considering even with all the work involved.

I think the rational for buying it was they were the single largest user of it, and were concerned about funding stability.

Does anyone have the numbers before they bought github, I saw them once, don't remember the values, just remember being shocked at what percentage of the total github code base was Microsoft. I had no idea they were using it at all.

And once again RMS was proven right.

How would the GPL have prevented this, exactly?

More explicitly, how would a license that gives everyone the right to copy, modify and redistribute source code for any purpose without compensation or attribution have prevented Github from building a tool that copies, modifies and redistributes source code without compensation or attribution?

Because if you use GPL code, you must release your use/changes under the GPL. That's why the GPL is often called infectious. If copilot spits out GPL code verbatim, the user of the code must respect the license.

You don't know how the GPL works. The GPL explicitly requires attribution. I don't understand what you thought you were saying. The GPL places strict requirements on the licensing of derivative works. You don't know how the GPL works.

And if they provide attribution?

afaik GitHub Inc is still independent company and independent from Microsoft

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