FSF call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot | Hacker News Reader

FSF call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot

fsf.org

23 pointszekrioca9 comments

Kind of a neat idea, but I guess I thought the questions posed are ones the FSF should be writing its own position on?

Separately, is $500 a good rate for a position paper?

These people place more importance in their dogma than they do in human progress.

Why should Microsoft get to steal your code for "human progress", while you can't steal Windows or Visual Studio code bases for the same reasons?

If your code is on public github you’re evidently happy for people to read it. VS code is open source.

The availability of the code doesn't mean that anybody can use it, that's why Open Source and Free (Libre) Software are two different concepts.

I did say "read". Clearly anyone can do that if you put it on github.

I also think that if you put your code publicly on github you shouldn't be surprised if people copy snippets from it. But I really have much less faith in lawyers than people like you do. I find conversations about software licences intensely dull. I code because I love it. And yes, I do have open source projects, including one with many users. I chose MIT licence FWIW although i was certainly very tempted by the Do What The Fuck You Like licence and its ilk.

Why doesn't Microsoft just train Copilot on it's own internal code base instead of other people's code who were never credited or compensated? Apparently profit is more important than human progress.

Don’t be silly, that’s not a hard question to answer. Because github is by far the world’s largest accessible repository of source code. Training on microsoft’s code would be incredibly restrictive and only cover some languages.

Actually sorry, was that a joke? Microsoft’s code for Windows is said to be pretty bad.

No it's not a joke. Microsoft can license it's own code and pay for the rest if they wanted to. It's not like MS can't afford it. They're flagrantly violating the licenses of countless open-source project for their own gain. It would be one thing if they only used code with permissible licenses like the MIT license but they didn't. You can't just steal other people's work. If you or me did this with Microsoft's proprietary code we would be sued and/or arrested. Why should MS be able to get away with something that's illegal for us plebs?

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