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Comment by uberman | Hacker News Reader

The impetus for the post is apparently "co-pilot" being a commercial service. I have no dog in this fight, just giving an overview of their main argument.

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The main point is that it's a commercial service that doesn't respect other people's licences.

Previously it was free and the noises that GitHub had given made it sound like it wasn't finished. Turns out it was.

It seems like a legal grey area because for the most part what CoPilot is doing seems like it should be a transformative use [1] and you don't need a license for that. But apparently sometimes CoPilot will spit out other people's code verbatim, so I wouldn't use it. Not worth the risk.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

The problem is that you can't tell whether you're looking at verbatim code or not. While you can tell when you're looking at "obviously verbatim" code, everything else could still be verbatim and license encumbered, so there is literally nothing you can use copilot for if your intent is to write new software.

But it gets worse: because you can't tell whether copilot is giving you illegal-to-use code, even just looking at its output can make you liable for future transgressions because seeing copilot code may expose you to license-encumbered code that you might now use as inspiration for new, non-copilot code. Even if you in good faith believe your new code is your own, the law does not agree with that assessment: if your code is similar to something license encumbered that you read in the past, even if you forget about it, you are now potentially in legal trouble.

Simply by using copilot at all, you're taking on a risk that is great enough to go "actually, I am not even going to try this thing".

Oh completely. It should be, but its also a black box which they refuse to discuss.

You don't know me, but it's totally fine to drink this this mysterious blue liquid. I pinky promise it isn't toilet cleaner.

It actually has an option that searches GitHub for collisions and rejects any matches from showing.

If i read the code published on github and later i do not infringe on any license. If later i'm hired to implement some function chances are that i'll produce code which is similar to what i've learned from github. Or if somebody asks me on how to implement some function and i can respond: Hey that and that project on github already doing it, just use it, i'm not infringing on any license. Now, replace "I" in the above paragraph by "Copilot". It seems that Copilot is not infringing on anything...

But as others highlighted, sometimes it is not just similar code, it is the exact same code. And if you as a human use code from another repo, you should respect that repo's license. This is the point: as it works now, Copilot isn't taking licenses into account.

Copilot is not a person.

They have a variety of good reasons at https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ , not just Copilot.

Another critical reason is that GitHub is proprietary and has a pile of services with lock-in that (unlike git) aren't easy to move elsewhere. Some people depend on GitHub for their livelihood (through GitHub Sponsors). Some people's software integrates tightly with GitHub bots, or Actions, or issues, or project management. Everything other than the code itself is incredibly difficult to port over to another service.

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