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Comment by skc | Hacker News Reader

I get the feeling this entire debate would have been non-existent had this been a Jetbrains product instead.

The whole thing is just bizarre when the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly without once looking at whatever license is attached.

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> I get the feeling this entire debate would have been non-existent had this been a Jetbrains product instead.

why so?

> The whole thing is just bizarre when the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly without once looking at whatever license is attached.

well, yes, copying an idea or pattern is generally.. accepted, to be kosher. copy-pasting too, in small amounts (a function, a type). that said, i would (and have) attribute even a notional similarity when writing something open source.

i don’t think co-pilot even allows the user to find where the code came from.

> the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly

Perhaps in your circles, but that's certainly not something I've encountered over a 25 year carreer.

So when you google a problem and it leads you to a code snippet that solves it that just happens to be OSS, you immediately scrub your brain and pretend you never saw it and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?

Google usage is outright forbidden for work in institutions that care about intellectual property rights, so the brain scrub issue is just arguing at the wrong level.

If you're googling solutions around you're already not taking intellectual property seriously enough to care about what happens after you lift ideas around.

Can you name these institutions? I am surprised to hear that some institutions would prevent devs from viewing e.g. documentation of the APIs they are using or academic papers about algorithms for computing the multiplicative inverses of 64-bit integers, if they accessed those things via google

IBM and another I'm currently under nda

I think them being also patent farm has a role in it.

Approved dependencies had api doc linked so no need to Google these.

This is interesting. Is the internet completely cut off? Do they have internal libraries of documentation for third party stuff they are using (paper? digital?) Do you have any example institutions, or what domain they are working in? Thanks.

I think it would be for super secure military coding. But business domains? Hardly ever.

The issue doesn't solely rest in copyright

A concern, which I think is legit, is that it is quite easy for someone with a strong presence in search, web advertising, analytics and mobile to puzzle together what a company is investing in based on the aggregated research and web access from known locations

Very surprised to hear about this actually.

Maybe I live in a bubble, but the likes of Google/StackOverflow have been part and parcel of a developers toolbox for many years now.

And in any case I wonder how that is enforced. Eg, Someone goes home in the evening and visits github, learns a new trick and comes into the office the next day and implements it.

> … and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?

Yes, I’m not a plagiarist.

If you’re literally copying and pasting code snippets without attribution, you’re plagiarizing.

You’re also probably violating the OSS project’s license.

It’s no different than copying and pasting someone else’s sentence or paragraph into a written paper.

I am not a lawyer, but my legal intuition / common sense says that “code snippets” are not copyrightable. There’s some sliding scale on when a code snippet would become so non-trivial that a reasonable (!) judge would consider it copyrightable, but nothing Copilot does is anywhere close to that limit, IMO.

One of the main claims in Google LLC v. Oracle America [0], was based around a 9-line rangeCheck function. Whilst some code can be too simple and small to copyright, programmers and lawyers are probably not going to view snippets the same way. Copilot creates risk.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

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