Doesn't really explain how co-pilot is stealing your community. I've used co-pilot and it works great until you are past boilerplate than it falls apart.
Perhaps the author means that there’s a possibility that the programmer to whom the code was suggested won’t necessarily know its provenance and how to engage the community from whence it came. If so, that’s a stronger argument, but I don’t know that it’s the best one they can make.
Writing software just auto-completing from CoPilot would be like trying to write a whole novel with the auto-predictive text on your phone. You could do it, but the results would be non-nonsensical and full of semantic errors. I don't think there's any real 'provenance' at play in either case.
This guy is a literal who, who is really over estimating the value of his open source contributions over a general development tool that can reduce the cognitive load of working in some hairy code bases.
I don't think it's CoPilot that's 'erasing' his, Racket, community.
The author seems to be implying that since Copilot can reproduce the code of open source repository X in certain scenarios there'd be no reason for programmers to learn/use/engage with repository X. But this is silly. Maybe some open source repositories could be tab completed with a little prompting but people will presumably choose to add a dependency instead of tab completing the code of express or something.
(Or I guess more technically, the original authors copyright still applies, and the rights granted to use the work under the license as an exception to the strict limitation under copyright - do not apply...)
Copilot is an AI stunt, an exploration, trying something new and exciting with very mixed and not-so-useful results.
This lawsuit, however, is just lawyers doing what they do for fun. I guess the retained Microsoft lawyers love it too. Glad to see lawyers having so much fun and profit. But we would all be better off with out so much lawyering, can't they do something more worthwhile?
The license and attribution are stripped from regurgitated copied code snippets from code projects. If the people don’t known which project the code was taken from, how can they one day contribute to that codebase? If the code projects on GitHub are not getting the people who use their code at least aware of the project, that project disappears. Copilot is an interloper who doesn’t even tell you which project the code snippet was ripped off from!!
If I solve a problem and I say: Sure, use my code if you want, but be sure to contribute any improvement back to the community - I wouldn’t be happy seeing a tool spewing it out everywhere. And it’s not even free. In this case, microsoft is literally making money on the back of millions of programmers. And without approval.
Reminds me of people who defend AI art with "you can tell it apart from real art" yeah no, at the rate we're moving you won't be able to tell at all in a year or two.
Generating snippets of code has nothing to do with a fully functional software package/product/service and an organic community around it.
One might argue that a community could be more easily formed thanks to co-pilot because it increases developer productivity and lower the effort to contribute so OS projects actually benefit from co-pilot. If this sounds far fetched, then probably the first case is also similar.
But they deliberately don’t tell you thst… it’s just a code snippet floating in space like they invented it
If the people don’t known which project the code was taken from, how can they one day contribute to that codebase?
If the code projects on GitHub are not getting the people who use their code at least aware of the project, that project disappears.
Copilot is an interloper who doesn’t even tell you which project the code snippet was ripped off from!!