Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

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Drew, that is a great post.

I have two comments and a question.

First, my comment is that GitHub claims the right to use any public code on the Internet, not just GitHub. This means that they claim the right to mine code on Sourcehut, or in my case, on my personal Gitea instance. I'm not sure your suggestion 1 covers that. I think it should.

Second, users could fork code from Sourcehut onto GitHub, and then even if GitHub only uses code on GitHub, they could then use that code. This is, of course, a consequence of using DVCS's and can't be worked around. Your first suggestion should also address this, in my opinion, by allowing original authors to opt-out.

Third, my question: you've surely seen the licenses I have been developing against Copilot ([1]) since you've emailed me about them. Do you think the way I've approached the anti-Copilot clause is still free and open? For reference, this is the clause in all of my licenses:

> In this license, the phrase “this software” includes the source code licensed under this license. It also includes the output of any execution of any algorithm that uses all or part of this software as all or part of its input, but only if the output itself is software.

(The rest of the license then says it applies to "this software.")

[1]: https://yzena.com/licenses/

I think that your clause is fine and does not cause these licenses to be non-free. But it is worded a little bit weirdly, by stating that the output of Copilot etc is literally "this software" rather than a "derivative work". I might suggest clarification on that part. Cheers!

That's a good suggestion. Unfortunately, "derivative work" is an established legal term, and was before the GPL, so I don't think I should use it. In fact, it should be part of my definition, now that I think about it.

However, if I can come up with some other term, then I'll definitely take your suggestion. I'll just define it to be "this software," any derivative work, or the application of an algorithm...and then make the license apply to that definition.

I hope that makes sense and is what you meant. If not, please let me know.

> First, my comment is that GitHub claims the right to use any public code on the Internet, not just GitHub. This means that they claim the right to mine code on Sourcehut, or in my case, on my personal Gitea instance. I'm not sure your suggestion 1 covers that. I think it should.

People are allowed to read code on the internet and then write code themselves based on their experiences of the code that is publicly available. Why can't a software tool do the same? Everybody is being ridiculous about this.

No, people are not allowed to just read code on the Internet and then write code themselves. It depends on what the code is that they write and how similar it is to the code they read and how creative the original code is.

For example, I'm developing an algorithm to merge two binary files of the same type, a completely new algorithm. Say someone reads the code for that algorithm when I am done and implements the same thing using the same algorithm, but refuses to put the AGPL on it (because that will be the license). Are they infringing? Absolutely.

This has, in fact, happened with the Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm, whose code is under the GPL. Copilot reproduced it verbatim, including swearing comments. [1]

People are not being ridiculous about this because it has already happened!

EDIT: Fixed a small mistake.

[1]: https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

'Fast Inverse Square Root algorithm, which is under the GPL'

The algorithm isn't under GPL, the code is. John took the algorithm itself from code which was written earlier.

Even if I play your dumb games the tool just suggests code the user can then choose to infringe or not.

The user has no idea about the provenance of the code they receive, so they can't know it they are infringing or not. If that is the case, then suggesting that users should merely choose to not infringe is equivalent to suggesting that users should not use Copilot at all.

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