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Comment by Master_Odin | Hacker News Reader

If this is MS trying to pull off EEE, what does the extinguish phase look like? That they try to make it so that any codebase the uses copilot is owned by them, and that there's no way to turn it off because all other editors or code hosting sites will exist? Plausible I suppose if they play the game for several decades and somehow no one else produces any innovation in the space.

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Extinguish might look like Microsoft or their customers/partners writing proprietary replacements for open source products with the help of copilot. I don't know how likely this is, but what co-pilot provides is a plausible path for leveraging open source code to create closed-source products. Over time this allows the proprietary software industry to contribute back less code while still benefitting enormously.

That would mean that Co-pilot is, or at least in big part, a front, a false flag operation to test the legal system's tolerance of what they are doing, to determine whether they can get away with what they are doing, right?

I'm not too sure yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if we wake up one day, and just like how it went with Facebook buying oculus, we will all of a sudden require some "microsoft account" to log into Github. Then more layers, and more, until there is nothing left.

Either that, or you wake up one day to see that Microsoft have stole your open source software and Microsoft says "but muh AI".

It's a new approach compared to Amazon taking open-source code and building AWS services that kill off attempts at self-funding (dual licensing/support services) by the people who made it. I hope it's not as successful. Amazon at least abided by the letter of the licenses.

>> "I'm not too sure yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if we wake up one day, and just like how it went with Facebook buying oculus, we will all of a sudden require some "microsoft account" to log into Github."

See: Minecraft. It was already a goldmine when they bought it, but they built it into an even bigger one before forcing millions to have a foot into their ecosystem. Copilot might be their way of making everyone dependent on GitHub before "moving on" from git and offering a Community Edition of their own source control system.

It'll be easy. A lot of people hate Git.

Embrace: How nice that we don't have to worry about GitHub closing for lack of funds. Thanks, Microsoft!

Extend: Make people dependent on GitHub Copilot. Require a Microsoft account (soon).

Extinguish: Sunset git and transition to Microsoft's own source control system.

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