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Comment by ellyagg | Hacker News Reader

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because making code as freely shareable and remixable as possible is a huge boon for humanity.

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Code being freely shareable and remixable is great. Selling that open source code for profit is not.

Is your take that Microsoft should offer this for free? Or if they are not willing to do it for free, Microsoft should cancel this service and we should wait for Apache or someone else to offer the service?

Or something else ?

Microsoft should make this service free for open source (not just thought leaders), and compensate people otherwise. I should have a 0.01% equity in Open AI if they're using my stuff like this.

Or they should do opt in.

Half serious/flippant, we need MS to create a cryptocurrency so that developers can be credited with micropayments each time their code gets “quoted” in the IDE.

<ducks>

What is wrong with someone making a little dough. It is just numbers in database.

Yeah, but those numbers translate to food on the table for my kids, a roof over their heads, better education, etc. Come on, this is a tired response. Nothing is wrong with people making money. There is a lot wrong with people making money off of the hard work of others without any consideration or remuneration.

I feel like you're missing the forest for the trees here - making code freely shareable and remixable is exactly the purpose of GPL and other free-software licenses, but you can bet that the proprietary codebases Copilot will be used in will go out of their way to prevent any such uses of _their_ particular code snippets.

IMO, the only way to use Copilot's output in an ethically sound way is to only use the output it produces in AGPL licensed projects (assuming that Copilot has not been trained on any non-free software codebases which in itself is a strong assumption).

> IMO, the only way to use Copilot's output in an ethically sound way is to only use the output it produces in AGPL licensed projects

Even then, that is missing attribution which should really be the default for all code reuse and derivation even when you legally are allowed to omit it.

Based on this comment, you may not understand what the GPL's purpose actually is, because it is NOT simply for the promoting sharing and remixing. The GPL is for ensuring that code, and its derivatives, are all able to be shared and remixed in perpetuity. the biggest (imo) difference between GPL and MIT/BSD licenses is that you CAN NOT use GPL'd code in a non-GPL* codebase. (*or GPL-compatible license)

It's just as shareable on Gitlab, no? And the issue isn't that code is not shareable - it's that a huge corporation is profiting from this code without consent from the developer.

> a huge corporation is profiting from this code without consent from the developer

Also without attribution. The more permissive licenses allow corporations to profit from shared code, but most of them still require attribution.

And it's really not much to ask: when someone gives you free code, give them credit for their work.

Well, I hope your viewpoint doesn't win the day, because breaching GPL left and right to make some developers life easier opens huge cans of worms.

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