Open source developers urged to ditch GitHub following Copilot launch | Hacker News Reader

Open source developers urged to ditch GitHub following Copilot launch

techcrunch.com

9 pointsyuvalhazaz5 comments

> The crux of the issue, and a bone of contention in the software development sphere since its debut last year, is that Copilot is a proprietary service built on top of the hard work of the open source community.

I don't understand this argument, because you could use the same one for basically any SaaS product that uses open source code.

However, this quote is more convincing:

> “Open source” doesn’t mean a complete free-for-all, and there are still license requirements to fulfil and attributions to include, so if Copilot “borrows” code from one project and suggests it to the author of another project, will this open the floodgates to copyright infringement lawsuits?

The "copyright infringement lawsuits" point aside, which I don't think applies to license issues, I think this raises a good point. Will it tell you which attributions to give, and will it respect licenses that require you to distribute code you make if you use that code (e.g. GPL), maybe by either warning you or allowing you to filter out code from those kinds of repositories?

I am talking out of my bum here, but I think it’s a good guess.

Normally when you sign up to you a service you are also giving that service provider access to your work. If that is the case here this access would exist outside of the license listed on any given GitHub repo as a separate agreement from the general public.

Specifically, section D.4 [1] of Github's terms of service. That agreement gives them the right to parse or analyze source code. Sounds very much like it justifies training copilot.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

This is all just old man yells at cloud. People read your code when it’s OSS and synthesize the ideas in their brains, GPT is doing roughly the same thing. There is no license to stop that, and anything that’s not Apache 2.0 is just nonsense anyway.

Exactly. After testing Copilot myself[0], I can see that the copy/pasted code is changed enough (by using variable and function names from your prompts or context) that no court would ever decide that you had infringed.

JavaScript and other languages aren't copyrightable by themselves. It's not illegal nor immoral to observe others' code and write something orthogonal in the same language.

[0] https://levelup.gitconnected.com/flying-with-github-copilot-...

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