Hacker News Reader

Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

Github is just the begining, they will crawl any open source code, crawling npm, pypi, cpan, public gitlab...

If your code is open source, they will get it.

That's kinda the point of open source.

Well... "the point of" open source for some of us is to participate in a collaborative commune where we are willing to contribute code to the collective specifically because other people are required to also contribute their code to said collective as part of a shared battle against opaque proprietary systems; so the concept that someone is going to then find it, scrape it, and "launder" what was supposed to be our competitive advantage into their closed source projects by training it into a glorified pattern recognizer and then regurgitating it into their text editor without even as much as attribution without realization that the work we did and contributed to the world was part of a tit-for-tat pact as they want to have their cake and eat it too kind of ruins it for me... like it is bad enough that I have to constantly guilt trip people into not violating my license already: systematizing it via Copilot is making me think that we might need even stricter mechanisms for distribution of code within the commune so as to build a kind of "decentralized trade secret". (That said, other than your wording about "the point of open source", I agree with your doom-y sentiment 100%.)

I’d argue that this new use case is very interesting to open source and how it relates to the various licenses, and not necessarily “the point of open source”.

I can imagine people being OK with their code being used as-is, and/or being modified, but not used completely out of context to train some corporate AI to inject code into commercial code based.

Agreed. I am considering relicensing all of my permissively licensed code because of this. The fundamental assumptions I had when releasing that code under a permissive license have been violated.

When you use a permissive license, it’s best you stop thinking of it as your code. You’ve set it free for everyone, and while you may retain copyright in some abstract sense, it really no longer belongs to you.

That’s a good thing.

While I agree with you--in that the vast majority of people who publish code under permissive licenses actually have an implied set of "moral code" restrictions that they end up surprised people violate even though they specifically allowed such by their choice of license (implying they should have chosen a different, and likely more restrictive, license)--even permissive licenses tend to at least include "you can't take my code without crediting me for taking my code", and so I can appreciate someone being upset about that not happening.

I think hackers being possessive about sequences of uint8s is exactly as silly as claiming the number 2 as your own personal property.

Under GitHub's legal theory (fair use), nothing you put in that license file can stop them from doing so legally.

If copyright applies, they're already in violation by failing to attribute your MIT contributions and could theoretically be sued for infringement (as they did not abide by the terms of the license).

MIT only requires attribution for "substantial portions". Whatever that is...

You can't give out something for free without limitations and then complain when someone uses it for something you didn't expect. Well you can complain but no one has to listen.

Githubs use seems very in the spirit of open data and code. Using open source to help others.

We didn't give it away for free without limitations: we carefully drafted licenses to attach to our code to establish legal boundaries on what we considered acceptable; my code, for example, is under GPL, which says "I am OK with you using the products of my labor under the requirement that you will then let me use the product of your labor"... hell: almost every bit of open source code has at minimum "I am OK with you using the products of my labor as long as you are at least willing to give me credit somewhere", a minimal limitation that Copilot doesn't honor (and prevents its users from honoring): Copilot is essentially a giant code launderer designed to strip away licenses from effort that was only contingently given to the community.

Licenses explicitly are the set of permissions and limitations for someone to use the code. Even most permissive open source licenses require that you maintain an attribution with the text of the license in derivative works. Copyleft licenses and in particular the GPL put very strict requirements on what types of licenses are acceptable in any derivative works.

In literally no open source license except "do-whatever-you-want-i-dont-give-a-damn-bye"-type licenses like WTFPL are you giving something away for free without limitations. That's not even close to what open source means, at all. Open source and public domain are not synonymous terms. And in those cases where there are literally any terms in a license, use of Copilot obviously violates the terms of the license, unless the user operating Copilot goes back, finds the code Copilot is stealing from, and makes the proper attribution / otherwise ensures that they are meeting the terms of the license of the stolen code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com