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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

I worry that, if Copilot-like things are ultimately declared to actually be legal, that many free software developers will withdraw their source code from public view, to avoid the code being used as mere fodder for proprietary developers to annex the code without being a part of the free software community.

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No need to worry, it's already happening. While I have not withdrawn anything (yet?), I stopped publishing new code to GitHub. I can't be the only one.

Does this change if the AI only uses fully permissive code? We took that approach at Tabnine and would be interested if the communities primary concern is disregard of licensing or the use of AI at all.

You could only permit it if the AI only used CC0 or Public Domain works. All other works require proper attribution, at the very least.

interesting point

> withdraw their source code from public view

Why do this if you can just migrate to GitLab or Source Hut?

why do you believe AI companies would never download code from Gitlab or sourcehut?

I assume GitHub could force you to allow Copilot to use your code for training with their terms and conditions? Whereas if it's from another source the licensing of the code has to specifically allow for commercial products

Not really, since people quite often don't own the copyright of code they upload to GH, by design almost.

> I assume GitHub could force you to allow Copilot to use your code for training with their terms and conditions?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? You’d think that at least Microsoft had some legal veneer to cover what they are doing. But no. They simply took “source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub”¹ and used it.

1. https://github.com/features/copilot/#what-data-has-github-co...

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