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Comment by tuckerman | Hacker News Reader

People aren't whining because the price is too high, they are upset because some (myself included) believe Microsoft is exploiting developers by copying their work against their wishes and then turning around and selling other developers a product which may or may not be generating code which violates copyright/patent licenses. A developer who inadvertently uses a copilot suggestion which gets them into hot water is going to be spending a lot more than a the cost of a latte to defend themselves in court.

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This. It is a matter of (a) consent and (b) compensating people that, without their data, the model would be useless.

If someone contributes to open source, then they shouldn't be surprised that someone else uses this code. The licensing hell is something that shouldn't belong in IT.

When source code is made available under an open source license, there are strings attached; attaching those strings is the author’s right! Assuming you or any company has the right to do anything you want with that code without respecting the license is immoral.

That “licensing hell” (i.e. strong copyleft protections) is the reason we enjoy such a vibrant and large open source community today. I don’t take it for granted that open source as we have it today was inevitable: it required a lot of work and I’d hate to see that slip away.

The licensing hell is exactly the problem. If someone contributes to open source, which is a praiseworthy activity, then they do it with the intention that anyone can use this code but also re-adapt it, bundle in new products - it's all about bringing humanity forward.

And all those "you can do this, but you can't do that" licenses are things that only invite lawyers to the tech world. IMHO, licensing open source is a bullshit activity.

You are making a lot of assumptions about what someone wants/intends when they contribute to open source codebases. If an author chooses, for example, the AGPL, I think they clearly had a different intention. Like it or not, not everyone wants to dedicate their work to the public domain.

Then why contribute to open source if you want to still be a gatekeeper? In that case better to fork it and work in a private repo.

Every large successful open source project I know is explicitly not in the public domain/licensed CC0. I understand that there are some people that are very against copyright/intellectual property but you surely must interact with a large number of projects/people that disagree.

GPL code is open source but what you do with it also needs to be open source as a condition of its use. Will CoPilot inform developers if suddenly the code suggested requires them to re-license their software?

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