16 ms·

GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free Software Foundation

252 points by axsharma 5y ago

BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
I wonder what their opinion will be if they exclude the GPL family of licenses and includes only permissive ones.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Looks to me like as long as there is no copyright/legal impact they don't really have an opinion ? It also makes sense, as someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code. [Edit: I mixed BSD and MIT, I was going for the more permissive one. The point on reproducing copyright mentions still stands though]
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    > someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code I don’t agree in general with this. Remember that the BSD family of licenses still require that a copyright notice and the terms of the license be reproduced in distribution of the software and derivatives of the software, both in source and in binary forms. Just cause I make software that I release under the ISC license, and I want proprietary software to be able to build on my work, does not mean I am ok with someone stripping away the copyright notice and the license terms from my code and claiming it as their own. Quite the opposite. However, at the same time, if what is being reproduced is only a small snippet or some generic code, as I understand is what Copilot will usually do, I don’t personally mind. But I still think it needs to be tried in courts and that we get some rulings on it. And I remain skeptical towards Copilot because I think it will be able to reproduce non-trivial portions of code as well, depriving people of credit for a lot of hard work that they put in. At the same time, it is cool tech, and it looks to have the potential to save a lot of time for a lot of its users by automating a lot of menial work in typing out the same old lines of code again and again. So it’s not like I am directly opposed to Copilot either. But I think we need to acknowledge the issues and that Microsoft and GitHub should work to address these kinds of things. And I am happy that the FSF is challenging them on these things, even though they are doing so from the point of view of a family of licenses that is more restrictive than the type of license I personally put on the code that I myself produce.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      This is a good point, I didn't think thoroughly about the license reproduction part (even applies for MIT licenses, as it stands)
- pankpank 5y ago
  Much easier to ask- I wonder what their opinion would be if githubs parent was not microsoft. These are all prejudiced people ingrained in their own old ways
- captn3m0 5y ago
  They haven't made their mind yet on the licensing problem: >With all these questions, many of them with legal implications [..] there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software. Their unacceptable and unjust opinion is just from the licensing of GitHub CoPilot / Visual Studio Code itself: >We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned.
  - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
    This seems like distinctly the type of fringe complaint only FSF could have, and everyone will ignore.
    - krageon 5y ago
      How is this a fringe complaint? The fact that an autocompletion framework is SaaS is an absolute disgrace. Nobody should be okay with using it.
      - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
        Copilot is an autocompletion framework the way Google is an autocompletion framework. Both are driven by vast amount of data processing that can't be done locally both because you don't have the horsepower and you don't have the bandwidth or pragmatic data access to terabytes of source code. So instead of vacuous appeals to emotion, it's better to justify our opinions with objective reasons other than "but I want to have this". We all want things, but we're not entitled to them. Aside from the fact Copilot literally can only be offered as a service due to its nature (unless you want to sound like one of those jokes where "you downloaded the internet to your USB stick"), everyone is free to offer a service precisely how they decide. They're not obligated to give you anything they don't want to. They don't have to listen to you, or FSF, or anyone else about what they consider, arbitrarily, an "absolute disgrace". You use it or you don't use it. Simple as that. P.S.: I consider it an absolute disgrace ice-cream is not free but this argument never seems to works in practice.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Their objection to it has nothing to do with the use of GPL source code. They object to it because: > We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. On the question of the use of source code released under the GPL, they do not have a position yet: > With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pornel 5y ago
  You can still violate a permissive license by not including a notice and the license text with your project.
- jedberg 5y ago
  They most likely are rebuilding the engine without GPL code and then doing a bunch of functional tests to see how bad it is. If it's not significantly worse, they will probably just not include GPL code anymore.
  - account42 5y ago
    MIT, BSD, zlib and Apache license also all require the copyright notice and license to be retained when copying significant source portions.
- varajelle 5y ago
  The reason they consider it unacceptable and unjust is simply because GitHub Copilot itself is using a proprietary blob.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    That's a fair and valid complaint. The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human. I think people value their code snipits way way too much. A 10 line function to post to twitter is not worth anything. Its an entire codebase that has value.
    - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
      > The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human. It literally applies to a human. Copyright is about reproducing the same work. "Transforming" the work means copyright doesn't apply. Most of your brain is trained on ideas that come from someone else's proprietary IP, whether you realize it or not. Think about that next time you're unintentionally humming that catchy tune from a Coca Cola commercial. The copy/transform distinction isn't just about fair use parodies or commentary, but things like writing music or drawing paintings or writing fictional books in a similar style to someone else (and using some of the same ideas). The crux here is that we can't accept that machine learning is "learning". We think of it as copying, therefore subject to copyright. It doesn't help that Copilot in edge cases will copy. But in many cases the resulting snippet is substantially a new work. But AI is inevitable, and therefore we'll have to start treating machines like human agents. It'll be really weird.
neximo64 5y ago
I think its a fantastic tool to use to work on though. I didn't think so seeing the demo i basically brushed it off. But using it is probably one of the most productive things to happen in the past decade I have my own GPL software out there, most of the time I think it doesn't get really used out there so its not that much of a concern to me, I imagine its like that for other devs too. I suppose if you're MongoDB (similar to GPL/used to be) or some big company you care more.
- ksec 5y ago
  I am wondering if there will be a GPL+ Copilot license.
injidup 5y ago
Summary: FSF claims the world will end. FSF offers 500 dollars for an intern to write a white paper studying the problem.
xaduha 5y ago
Why do I get a feeling that MS is fine with any turn of events? If some licenses get excluded, then in a way those gain more points in 'pain' according to this https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perception-Report.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perce.... But what does MS care?
- oaiey 5y ago
  MS will just retrain the model on a different input. They could not care less and will actually happy that they get an external statement on the license situation and the ethics.
KronisLV 5y ago
Here's an exceprt from the linked FSF blog article: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-white-papers-on-philosophical-and-legal-questions-around-copilot https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit... Areas of interest While any topic related to Copilot's effect on free software may be in scope, the following questions are of particular interest: - Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use? - How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works? - How can developers ensure that any code to which they hold the copyright is protected against violations generated by Copilot? - Is there a way for developers using Copilot to comply with free software licenses like the GPL? - If Copilot learns from AGPL-covered code, is Copilot infringing the AGPL? - If Copilot generates code which does give rise to a violation of a free software licensed work, how can this violation be discovered by the copyright holder on the underlying work? - Is a trained artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) model resulting from machine learning a compiled version of the training data, or is it something else, like source code that users can modify by doing further training? - Is the Copilot trained AI/ML model copyrighted? If so, who holds that copyright? - Should ethical advocacy organizations like the FSF argue for change in copyright law relevant to these questions? While i do believe that the topic is definitely worthy of discussion, my question would be a bit different. If the tooling is already pretty capable, wouldn't just ignoring all of the ethical questions lead to having a market advantage? Say, some company doesn't necessarily care about how the tool was trained and the implications of that, but just utilize it to have their developers write software at a 1.25x the speed of competition, knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance. Wouldn't that mean that they'd also be more likely to beat their competition to market? Ergo, wouldn't NOT using Codepilot or tools like Tabnine put most others at a disadvantage? Personally, i just see that as the logical and unavoidable progression of development tooling, the other issues notwithstanding, very much like IDEs did become commonplace with their refactoring tooling and autocomplete. I've worked with Visual Studio Code on large Java codebases, as i've also used Eclipse, NetBeans and in the past few years IntelliJ IDEA; with every next tool i found that my productivity increased bunches. Now it's to a point where the IDE suggests not only a variety of fixes for the code itself, but also the tooling, such as installing Maven dependencies, adding new Spring configurations and so on. It would be hard to imagine going back to doing things manually and it feels like in time it'll be very much the same way in regards to the language syntax or looking at documentation for trivial things. After all, i'm paid to solve problems, not sit around and ponder how to initialize some library.
pydry 5y ago
I'm kind of wondering if this controversy might not end up being a storm in a teacup. From what I've seen copilot really lowers the barrier to writing buggy code. If indeed it does turn out to be a tool that lends itself to machine gunning rather than shooting yourself in the foot it almost doesnt matter who owns what IP. The relentless attempts at developer commodification will, of course, continue, but I can already sense this one ending up like the developer outsourcing craze of the mid-2000s that the Economist also got a little too excited about.
- zaarn 5y ago
  If the code ends up being non-IP infringing on the code used to train it, that would be a big win for open source / free software. Now you can just grab any leaked code of a closed source program, feed it into your AI and get back code you can license under the GPL and nobody can do anything about it. An easy application I can think of is ZFS; simply feed the AI all CDDL licensed code, then ask it to reproduce ZFS. Probably will have some bugs but it would be licensable under GPL if the AI is considered a whiteroom.
  - worldsayshi 5y ago
    If you hire a programmer that has worked on said closed source and ask them to recreate that code in your GPL licensed program - at what point will that be considered infring on the original? Can you relicense code of you feed it through a programmer?
    - anonunivgrad 5y ago
      That would be strong evidence in court of copyright infringement and possibly trade secret theft.
    - zaarn 5y ago
      A programmer is a living breathing human, a legal entity that can hold copyright and is capable of violating copyright. An AI cannot hold copyright however and isn't capable of violating copyright (legal entities are, which an AI is not).
detaro 5y ago
this mostly seems to report about the FSF writing a post, which already had discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998109 (281 points, 203 comments)
ksec 5y ago
>> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. So they dont know / not sure of the question of GPL usage in copilot. But they have a problem with SaaS and product that are not open sourced?
- rightbyte 5y ago
  There is no contradiction in that.
  - ksec 5y ago
    I dont know. I guess I am not well versed with FSF. I thought they were to promote Free Software, I didn't know their world view was any non-open source software are "unacceptable and unjust".
    - yakubin 5y ago
      According to the FSF[1]: > To release a nonfree program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is no obstacle to your doing this. It paints a picture of a bigoted organisation. [1]: <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAnd...>
      - diffeomorphism 5y ago
        That sounds like the completely wrong word for that. The free software foundation advocates for free software, does not like non-free software, big surprise. Similarly fair trade does consider non-fair trade unethical. You might disagree with that but having an opinion does not make one a "bigot".
        yakubin 5y ago
        There is a difference between advocating for free software and saying that all non-free software is evil. To compare to the original meaning of "bigotry", there is a difference between talking about how great your religion is and talking about how all other religions are evil.
isoprophlex 5y ago
Morally, I hope the FSF wins. Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids. The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!
- lyptt 5y ago
  I like the way you think
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Nothing that another ANN can't solve. Humans need not program
  - ArnoVW 5y ago
    I guess it's tongue-in-cheek. But you made me imagine the scenario for a movie : once humans start going down that rabbit hole, code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched.
    - stepbeek 5y ago
      Will machines even need clean code? The benefit to a human of clean code is readability. The all-coder will need no such luxuries.
      - worldsayshi 5y ago
        Clean code means fewer states to test to know if it's doing the right thing. Messy code should be more costly to analyze and test.
      - waterhouse 5y ago
        What happens when one all-coder needs to understand or debug another all-coder's code? The definition of "readable" may change, but I imagine there would still be ways of organizing the code that would make it easier or harder. The halting problem would seem to imply that, for any given all-coder, it's possible to obfuscate hard enough to frustrate that all-coder.
cblconfederate 5y ago
copilot looks very cool, but if people end up using it a lot, it probably means their programming language is not expressive enough, after all they were invented in order to be accessible to humans. What i'd like to see is a copilot for scientific papers. There s so much duplication out there that it would be easy to train and it would save tons of time from the chore of writing and referencing the same things over and over
uberswe 5y ago
Copilot is a fancy autocomplete tool for code. I think the controversy comes from it being trained on public repos without adhering to licensing. I used copilot and thought the best part was when it would autocomplete based on other code I was writing. Sometimes the Copilot would help me see places where I had repetitive code which could be turned into a function.
ben-gy 5y ago
I’ve been using copilot for the past couple to months, and it’s seriously becoming a part of my daily coding workflow. The majority of suggestions are not quite what I want but then I’ve found the more I comment my code the more personalised the suggestions get and consequently (as a solo founder in my own startup) copilot finishing my code for me during late nights trying to ship features for customers before the following day is something I have become grateful for. It’s a double edged sword because it’s enabling me to grow my business and remain self employed, but I also understand the concerns and at the end of the day it’s not something I need to do my job (like version control or an IDE for example), but more of a nice to have…
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  What are your thoughts on the IP though? Aren't you worried that the code you're writing ends up being a huge legal ticking bomb?
  - nojito 5y ago
    Only if people are distributing the code. You’d be surprised at how much code is “borrowed”
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  How is it useful to you? It feels like the majority of my coding consists of translating extremely complex business requirements that neither the business people nor me understand 100% into highly specific code that appears to do what we want it to do. How can Copilot help me here?
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Most people are out there making what are essentially wordpress blogs but in a different language.
  - dmos62 5y ago
    Once you've figured out an algorithm, you still need to code it. Thinking != coding. Coding is the easy and cheap part.
jfmc 5y ago
Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering. It is unethical and unfair to the open source community. I do not care if it breaks code to bits and recomposes them again regurgitated by <YOUR-LATEST-AI-TECHNIQUE-HERE> in a way that is untraceable: it would not work without learning from our open source code. Code produced by this method should be automatically licensed under the most restrictive license of its input used for learning.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  How do you draw the line between allowed learning and disallowed learning? You don't think it's unethical for a human to learn from open source code and then write their own private code, surely?
  - jfmc 5y ago
    That is NOT the point. You are allowed to learn whatever you want. What is horribly unethical is not recognizing the life-long effort of the people who wrote the original code and designed the original algorithms. Programmers are not machines. The human *knows* the open source that she/he is reading and she/he can acknowledge it in their own code (either public or private). What is the copyright of code written with copilot? Copilot learns the code and forgets authors. Would you agree if I take your open source project, learn piece by piece, rewrite it from scratch and put my name on it without a single word about your work?
    - Operyl 5y ago
      > Would you agree if I take your open source project, learn piece by piece, rewrite it from scratch and put my name on it without a single word about your work? If it was indeed written from scratch, I see no reason (although it’d feel nice) to credit my original work. Having multiple implementations of an idea is always a great thing.
      - jfmc 5y ago
        How do you separate the implementation from the algorithm/idea? I do not believe that you'd be fine if you invest a significant period of your life on some idea that someone else copies without at least some credit (i.e., replacing your name by theirs?). Nobody works like this unless your time worths nothing or your idea is trivial. Open source would be ruined if everyone believed that copying smart code without recognizing the authors is ethical. Would this kind of copying be fine in software and not in other scientific papers or other industrial processes? Would it be fine if I train copilot on a patent database and start creating new patents (at a rate in which is would be unpractical to determine that it is regurgitating prior art)?
dmos62 5y ago
Could this become something people can't program without? Like imagine being stuck recycling the same programs and paradigms, not being able to move to something new, because Copilot hasn't seen it before.
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  I'd guess yes, for some people. Others, though, will refuse to use copilot out of sheer obstinacy if nothing else. They will produce the new paradigms for copilot to then consume.
donohoe 5y ago
FSF lost all moral authority to call anything ‘unacceptable and unjust’ when it welcomed back Richard Stallman.
docflabby 5y ago
GitHub is now a burning platform for free software - plan according
- _pmf_ 5y ago
  It SourceForged itself.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
IANAL, but until the question of whether software produced with the aid of Copilot, thus potentially containing LGPL'd, GPL'd or even AGPL'd code fragments (you never know really AIU) is subject to these respective or other copyleft licenses is settled, I think customers are well advised to stay clear of using Copilot. To the best of my knowledge, github won't provide legal shelter if customers are getting sued for xGPL violations; GPL, OTOH, has sufficient case law to make using Copilot very risky.
k__ 5y ago
I think Copilot is a hard problem, maybe it isn't even solvable. Sometimes it blatantly copies GPL code without my knowledge. Sometimes I myself write code that could be part of a GPL code-base, without knowing. Funny thing is, the difference here isn't the actual code that's written, but that Copilot has seen many GPL code bases and I didn't. Sometimes I really have the feeling Copilot understands my code base and suggests code that seems to be custom tailored to it. Albeit in most of the cases it doesn't fit 100%. I think the latter cases are when Copilot shines and doesn't violate GPL code at all, but can I be safe? Probably never.
jeroenhd 5y ago
I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code so they train it almost exclusively on other people's code that they don't care for it it gets stolen. Their assumption seems to be "if Bing can find it, it's up for grabs, no matter the license". Good luck getting the same treatment from MS if you upload the leaked XP kernel to github to make your own fork. I'll accept the ethics of copilot when they add the source code for Windows, Azure and Office to their training set, because only then will MS truly reflect that their model doesn't cross the spirit or even letter of any licensing.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I'm curious if they took only the whole of Github after acquiring Github, or if they've taken 'all publically visible code everywhere'. Y'know, as an open source dev who's continued to use Github after Microsoft took it over. I'm curious if I walked right into that one or if it would've made no difference whatsoever.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  > I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code Microsoft can of course create Copilot using the GitHub code. It’s not publishing any derived work on its own - and this type of access to the code is likely a large part of the reason for buying GitHub in the first place. The only ethical issue for Microsoft here is if Microsoft sells this service (they don’t - yet) and risk including nontrivial code without attribution (seems likely, given the behavior of the preview but if ms for example limits output to a few lines or prevents generating too large chunks verbatim the issue almost disappears). Ethical/legal issues and risks for users of Copilot are much larger, such as if they use it to conjure up a nontrivial snippet and then not research the origin of it. It’s no better than copying it from the original location. Microsoft could probably throw in parts of their closed source in copilot - but not even Microsoft controls that. Third parties have copyrights that prevent it too. But people who keep code in public GitHub repos (I assume) let GitHub do things like train neural nets on it, and Microsoft obviously don’t keep much of the windows or office sources in public GitHub repos.
Accacin 5y ago
To be perfectly honest, I think people will realise it's just not that useful and forget about it pretty quickly Even at my place of work, there were some expressing interest in it, and after playing for an hour or two, haven't touched it since. I get the impression there are more people discussing it than actually using it.
- mullikine 5y ago
  These language models are not being utilised very well by tools such as copilot because they are not mapping very many functions from the editor to language model. The more functions you map, the more you get out of it. If Copilot's workings were completely open and configurable, you would find that people collectively can work together to map many functions to the language model. They are capable of far greater wonders with deep integration and collaboration. I have tried to demonstrate this with emacs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28045894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28045894
  - Accacin 5y ago
    Interesting, thank you.
gibbonsrcool 5y ago
Do we owe all our professors and textbook makers compensation when we make money off our brain neural networks that they trained? Everyone also keeps talking about how bad copilot is. It’s the first step! It’s only going to improve and probably fast, given the potential value creation.
hesk 5y ago
So, I'm reading the linked article by RMS about Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) [1] which is one of the reasons why they object against GitHub Copilot. The key argument why as SaaSS is ethically wrong is because it denies control over a computation that I could do on my own. > "The clearest example is a translation service, which translates (say) English text into Spanish text. Translating a text for you is computing that is purely yours. You could do it by running a program on your own computer, if only you had the right program. (To be ethical, that program should be free.) The translation service substitutes for that program, so it is Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS. Since it denies you control over your computing, it does you wrong. (emphasis mine)" I don't find that argument very convincing because it implicitly assumes that there is no alternative translation program that I could run on my own computer. However, if there is an alternative, then a SaaS offers me choice. I can run a program on my own computer, e.g., if I am concerned about data privacy, or service reliability. The downside is that I have to install and maintain the software on my computer. Or, I could use an external service. The upside is that the barriers of use are minimal. Of all the articles by RMS I have read so far, I find this one the least convincing. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
catern 5y ago
The FSF has made no such statement. This article is complete bullshit and a slanted quote. The FSF said it was unacceptable because it's proprietary, like Github in general. They've made no statement about the specific details of Copilot.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago
The position of the FSF is severely misrepresented by the title. Open the full article, you'll see that all FSF says is GitHub Copilot is proprietary software and SaaS, and all forms of proprietary software and SaaS are unacceptable and unjust. What about the copyright issue of machine learning, then? FSF says it's a new thing with many open questions, they are not really sure, right now they are calling for whitepapers from the public to hear your comments [0]. I think it's a reasonable position to take. Reducing the scope of fair use to strengthen copyleft is a double-edged sword, as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways. It's an issue that requires careful considerations. [0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-white-papers-on-philosophical-and-legal-questions-around-copilot https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways. Could it? Copyright law is FOSS's only protection. That's why it's witty - copyright law against copyright. Weakening copyright law in an ad hoc way is absolutely not good for FOSS. It's fine to rewrite copyright in a way that explicitly allows things like Copilot, as long as FOSS gets to copy bits of proprietary code, too. Otherwise, after some appeals court judgement that the FOSS community failed to participate in (or even worse, subelements participated in on the wrong side) we're going to end up with a copyright practice that looks like the NFL exception in monopoly law.
  - bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago
    > It's fine to rewrite copyright in a way that explicitly allows things like Copilot, as long as FOSS gets to copy bits of proprietary code, too. This is exactly what I was thinking about. If Copilot is fair use, it means that all proprietary source code, as long as they're publicly available to read, will be free to use as training materials for a hypothetical free and open source machine learning project, which I think would be a good thing. An example is a proprietary program released under a restrictive "source available" license, you can read it but not reuse it under any circumstances (and I believe these projects are already included in Copilot's training data). This is why I said fair use can be a good thing and a ruling to reduce the scope of fair use can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community. It would be even better if training from all forms of available proprietary binary code can be fair use, too. It may allow the creation of powerful static binary analysis or code generation tools by learning from essentially all free-to-download proprietary software without copyright restrictions. However, the situation of proprietary binary code is more complicated here. Reverse engineering proprietary binary code is explicitly permitted by the US copyright laws, but the "no reverse engineering" clause in EULA overrides it, and this can be a bad thing. It makes FOSS's fair use right meaningless, meanwhile giving proprietary software vendors a free pass to ignore FOSS licenses. Thus the outcome is unclear, it may go either way, this is why I said such an issue requires careful considerations.
Proven 5y ago
Maybe to some it is, but to many it isn't. The FSF guys are pissed off because this is OSS reuse at industrial scale which cuts them out of the loop. Especially with the trend to use permissive licensing - it's becoming too frictionless for their liking.
exporectomy 5y ago
> The FSF said there are legal questions pertaining to Copilot [...] There have always been lots of untested legal questions about GPL & co. Why hasn't the FSF figured out what it is they do and don't want? Shouldn't knowing what the licenses actually mean and communicating that to people be their number one job? Why else do they exist? To spread feelings and confusion?
vrocmod 5y ago
I’ve been using Copilot for weeks now. It’s definitely useful for building upon what you already wrote. It’s very effective for single lines, but I don’t trust it to come up with entire functions. I tried, but obviously YMMV. The licensing is definitely a problem, but I think that Copilot only highlighted the issue - it didn’t create it. The concept of software license looks pretty fragile to me. You can own software but you can’t really own PL statements. You can own the whole but you can’t really own the atomic parts that make the whole. If so, closed-source is just a way to make you work really hard to achieve a result that someone else already achieved by means of obfuscation and secrecy. I’m not sure where open-source stands. Maybe it’s just a social contract.
hankman86 5y ago
I’d imagine that GitHub will end up re-training Copilot, excluding any “copyleft” licensed code. Not because what they do is legally tainted, but to avoid being berated by the FSF and the bad press that ensues. Once again though, the FSF makes “free software” less relevant and harder to use. Who will want to use such software for anything when being threatened with costly litigation and bad press?
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Tangential, but isn't it kind of weird that Copilot is a code generator and not a style-gann kind of code refactorer? That feels like a much easier task because you get to infer the intent of code from an existing example rather than from context alone.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  It gives rise to some interesting situations. I'm an open source audio coder. I'm not any great shakes as a programmer but I make my living by regularly coming up with novel ideas, and my codebase is on Github and MIT licensed. Over the course of hundreds of DSP plugins, some key parts are very repetitive. This means that there are audio processing algorithms I do which NOBODY ELSE is doing, because they're unusual and in some ways arbitrarily wrong. They're chosen to produce a particular sound rather than the textbook-correct algorithm output. Example: interleaved IIR filters, to make the audio interact differently in the midrange and produce a lower Q factor at the cost of producing some odd artifacts near the Nyquist frequency. Nobody out there in the normal world or commercial DSP or academia would intend to do that, because there are significant reasons not to (which I work around, in context). But if that stuff appears in Copilot output, they are jacking my INTENT but violating the very lenient MIT license by stripping my credit. They'd also be misleading hapless audio programmers who didn't intend to adopt my techniques, but that's a side issue. I'm interested in who else out there has a substantial codebase subject to Copilot reprocessing, who is demonstrating intent that isn't 'normal' and doesn't exist in the 'normal' world of whatever domain's being coded for. The point is, can it be demonstrated that Microsoft is taking SPECIFIC things from specific open source developers that can be clearly traced back to one source of distinct intentions, and then stripping the licensing? I feel like said intentions cannot be 'normal and industry-standard and correct'. It's gotta be things like my IIR interleaving, where it's a quirky choice you wouldn't automatically do, very likely with costs and consequences in its own right. Something you could choose to adopt if you liked the trade-offs (or in my case, the sound).
i386 5y ago
Copilot is a cool tech demo but it’s a very bad idea to have low skilled developers wire boilerplate code that they can only edit once.
codingdave 5y ago
> The reason is that Copilot requires running software that is not free, such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE or Visual Studio Code editor the FSF contends, and constitutes a “service as a software substitute” meaning it’s a way to gain power over other people’s computing. Hold up a second. So if people have already made the choice to run software that is not free... enhancing their chosen tool set is unjust? (Besides, VS Code is free.) I'm honestly interested in understanding their perspective, but I'm not following the leap from using an extension in VS code to gaining power over other people's computing.
- toastal 5y ago
  Free as in beer. Their built-in tracking to the editor from Microsoft isn't freedom. There's VS Codium that compiles the MIT project without telemetry, but at that rate, I'd use a different editor.
dangoljames 5y ago
My biggest problem with copilot is not how it's trained, but with it's targeting of microsoft coding tools. I don't use visual anything, and I don't know anyone who does. I code a lot of python, html and JS, and I use neovim. If I need a smart 'crutch' I'll whip out pycharm. Mostly I don't feel the need for such things, but it would be fun and interesting to see just how good copilot is. Not fun enough to install visual whatsit though.
fareesh 5y ago
What seems useful to me is the ability to type in "function that takes the path to an image file and returns a new image file with rounded corners". These are not groundbreaking problems - I'm generally looking for solution out there that uses a popular library. This is especially useful if it's a language where I'm not up to date on the de-facto library of choise is for various use-cases. In most cases, especially while prototyping I'm not going to write it myself, nor care about which library - I'm far more concerned with some big picture goal. If someone builds a product that can do the work of Googling a solution for me, that's the draw of the product. The code is freely available anyway.
darepublic 5y ago
When tech such as copilot truly comes into its own it should be a productivity silver bullet. I hope at that point I will have access to it. At the point we have senior software engineer coding as a service if I had it just for myself I would hoard and not be quick to share

252 points by axsharma 5y ago

BulgarianIdiot 5y ago

I wonder what their opinion will be if they exclude the GPL family of licenses and includes only permissive ones.

makeitdouble 5y ago
Looks to me like as long as there is no copyright/legal impact they don't really have an opinion ? It also makes sense, as someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code. [Edit: I mixed BSD and MIT, I was going for the more permissive one. The point on reproducing copyright mentions still stands though]
- codetrotter 5y ago
  > someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code I don’t agree in general with this. Remember that the BSD family of licenses still require that a copyright notice and the terms of the license be reproduced in distribution of the software and derivatives of the software, both in source and in binary forms. Just cause I make software that I release under the ISC license, and I want proprietary software to be able to build on my work, does not mean I am ok with someone stripping away the copyright notice and the license terms from my code and claiming it as their own. Quite the opposite. However, at the same time, if what is being reproduced is only a small snippet or some generic code, as I understand is what Copilot will usually do, I don’t personally mind. But I still think it needs to be tried in courts and that we get some rulings on it. And I remain skeptical towards Copilot because I think it will be able to reproduce non-trivial portions of code as well, depriving people of credit for a lot of hard work that they put in. At the same time, it is cool tech, and it looks to have the potential to save a lot of time for a lot of its users by automating a lot of menial work in typing out the same old lines of code again and again. So it’s not like I am directly opposed to Copilot either. But I think we need to acknowledge the issues and that Microsoft and GitHub should work to address these kinds of things. And I am happy that the FSF is challenging them on these things, even though they are doing so from the point of view of a family of licenses that is more restrictive than the type of license I personally put on the code that I myself produce.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    This is a good point, I didn't think thoroughly about the license reproduction part (even applies for MIT licenses, as it stands)
pankpank 5y ago
Much easier to ask- I wonder what their opinion would be if githubs parent was not microsoft. These are all prejudiced people ingrained in their own old ways
captn3m0 5y ago
They haven't made their mind yet on the licensing problem: >With all these questions, many of them with legal implications [..] there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software. Their unacceptable and unjust opinion is just from the licensing of GitHub CoPilot / Visual Studio Code itself: >We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned.
- BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
  This seems like distinctly the type of fringe complaint only FSF could have, and everyone will ignore.
  - krageon 5y ago
    How is this a fringe complaint? The fact that an autocompletion framework is SaaS is an absolute disgrace. Nobody should be okay with using it.
    - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
      Copilot is an autocompletion framework the way Google is an autocompletion framework. Both are driven by vast amount of data processing that can't be done locally both because you don't have the horsepower and you don't have the bandwidth or pragmatic data access to terabytes of source code. So instead of vacuous appeals to emotion, it's better to justify our opinions with objective reasons other than "but I want to have this". We all want things, but we're not entitled to them. Aside from the fact Copilot literally can only be offered as a service due to its nature (unless you want to sound like one of those jokes where "you downloaded the internet to your USB stick"), everyone is free to offer a service precisely how they decide. They're not obligated to give you anything they don't want to. They don't have to listen to you, or FSF, or anyone else about what they consider, arbitrarily, an "absolute disgrace". You use it or you don't use it. Simple as that. P.S.: I consider it an absolute disgrace ice-cream is not free but this argument never seems to works in practice.
user-the-name 5y ago
Their objection to it has nothing to do with the use of GPL source code. They object to it because: > We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. On the question of the use of source code released under the GPL, they do not have a position yet: > With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pornel 5y ago
You can still violate a permissive license by not including a notice and the license text with your project.
jedberg 5y ago
They most likely are rebuilding the engine without GPL code and then doing a bunch of functional tests to see how bad it is. If it's not significantly worse, they will probably just not include GPL code anymore.
- account42 5y ago
  MIT, BSD, zlib and Apache license also all require the copyright notice and license to be retained when copying significant source portions.
varajelle 5y ago
The reason they consider it unacceptable and unjust is simply because GitHub Copilot itself is using a proprietary blob.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  That's a fair and valid complaint. The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human. I think people value their code snipits way way too much. A 10 line function to post to twitter is not worth anything. Its an entire codebase that has value.
  - BulgarianIdiot 5y ago
    > The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human. It literally applies to a human. Copyright is about reproducing the same work. "Transforming" the work means copyright doesn't apply. Most of your brain is trained on ideas that come from someone else's proprietary IP, whether you realize it or not. Think about that next time you're unintentionally humming that catchy tune from a Coca Cola commercial. The copy/transform distinction isn't just about fair use parodies or commentary, but things like writing music or drawing paintings or writing fictional books in a similar style to someone else (and using some of the same ideas). The crux here is that we can't accept that machine learning is "learning". We think of it as copying, therefore subject to copyright. It doesn't help that Copilot in edge cases will copy. But in many cases the resulting snippet is substantially a new work. But AI is inevitable, and therefore we'll have to start treating machines like human agents. It'll be really weird.

neximo64 5y ago

I think its a fantastic tool to use to work on though. I didn't think so seeing the demo i basically brushed it off. But using it is probably one of the most productive things to happen in the past decade I have my own GPL software out there, most of the time I think it doesn't get really used out there so its not that much of a concern to me, I imagine its like that for other devs too. I suppose if you're MongoDB (similar to GPL/used to be) or some big company you care more.

ksec 5y ago
I am wondering if there will be a GPL+ Copilot license.

injidup 5y ago

Summary: FSF claims the world will end. FSF offers 500 dollars for an intern to write a white paper studying the problem.

xaduha 5y ago

Why do I get a feeling that MS is fine with any turn of events? If some licenses get excluded, then in a way those gain more points in 'pain' according to this https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perception-Report.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perce.... But what does MS care?

oaiey 5y ago
MS will just retrain the model on a different input. They could not care less and will actually happy that they get an external statement on the license situation and the ethics.

KronisLV 5y ago

Here's an exceprt from the linked FSF blog article: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-white-papers-on-philosophical-and-legal-questions-around-copilot https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit... Areas of interest While any topic related to Copilot's effect on free software may be in scope, the following questions are of particular interest: - Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use? - How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works? - How can developers ensure that any code to which they hold the copyright is protected against violations generated by Copilot? - Is there a way for developers using Copilot to comply with free software licenses like the GPL? - If Copilot learns from AGPL-covered code, is Copilot infringing the AGPL? - If Copilot generates code which does give rise to a violation of a free software licensed work, how can this violation be discovered by the copyright holder on the underlying work? - Is a trained artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) model resulting from machine learning a compiled version of the training data, or is it something else, like source code that users can modify by doing further training? - Is the Copilot trained AI/ML model copyrighted? If so, who holds that copyright? - Should ethical advocacy organizations like the FSF argue for change in copyright law relevant to these questions? While i do believe that the topic is definitely worthy of discussion, my question would be a bit different. If the tooling is already pretty capable, wouldn't just ignoring all of the ethical questions lead to having a market advantage? Say, some company doesn't necessarily care about how the tool was trained and the implications of that, but just utilize it to have their developers write software at a 1.25x the speed of competition, knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance. Wouldn't that mean that they'd also be more likely to beat their competition to market? Ergo, wouldn't NOT using Codepilot or tools like Tabnine put most others at a disadvantage? Personally, i just see that as the logical and unavoidable progression of development tooling, the other issues notwithstanding, very much like IDEs did become commonplace with their refactoring tooling and autocomplete. I've worked with Visual Studio Code on large Java codebases, as i've also used Eclipse, NetBeans and in the past few years IntelliJ IDEA; with every next tool i found that my productivity increased bunches. Now it's to a point where the IDE suggests not only a variety of fixes for the code itself, but also the tooling, such as installing Maven dependencies, adding new Spring configurations and so on. It would be hard to imagine going back to doing things manually and it feels like in time it'll be very much the same way in regards to the language syntax or looking at documentation for trivial things. After all, i'm paid to solve problems, not sit around and ponder how to initialize some library.

pydry 5y ago

I'm kind of wondering if this controversy might not end up being a storm in a teacup. From what I've seen copilot really lowers the barrier to writing buggy code. If indeed it does turn out to be a tool that lends itself to machine gunning rather than shooting yourself in the foot it almost doesnt matter who owns what IP. The relentless attempts at developer commodification will, of course, continue, but I can already sense this one ending up like the developer outsourcing craze of the mid-2000s that the Economist also got a little too excited about.

zaarn 5y ago
If the code ends up being non-IP infringing on the code used to train it, that would be a big win for open source / free software. Now you can just grab any leaked code of a closed source program, feed it into your AI and get back code you can license under the GPL and nobody can do anything about it. An easy application I can think of is ZFS; simply feed the AI all CDDL licensed code, then ask it to reproduce ZFS. Probably will have some bugs but it would be licensable under GPL if the AI is considered a whiteroom.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  If you hire a programmer that has worked on said closed source and ask them to recreate that code in your GPL licensed program - at what point will that be considered infring on the original? Can you relicense code of you feed it through a programmer?
  - anonunivgrad 5y ago
    That would be strong evidence in court of copyright infringement and possibly trade secret theft.
  - zaarn 5y ago
    A programmer is a living breathing human, a legal entity that can hold copyright and is capable of violating copyright. An AI cannot hold copyright however and isn't capable of violating copyright (legal entities are, which an AI is not).

detaro 5y ago

this mostly seems to report about the FSF writing a post, which already had discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998109 (281 points, 203 comments)

ksec 5y ago

>> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. So they dont know / not sure of the question of GPL usage in copilot. But they have a problem with SaaS and product that are not open sourced?

rightbyte 5y ago
There is no contradiction in that.
- ksec 5y ago
  I dont know. I guess I am not well versed with FSF. I thought they were to promote Free Software, I didn't know their world view was any non-open source software are "unacceptable and unjust".
  - yakubin 5y ago
    According to the FSF[1]: > To release a nonfree program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is no obstacle to your doing this. It paints a picture of a bigoted organisation. [1]: <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ReleaseUnderGPLAnd...>
    - diffeomorphism 5y ago
      That sounds like the completely wrong word for that. The free software foundation advocates for free software, does not like non-free software, big surprise. Similarly fair trade does consider non-fair trade unethical. You might disagree with that but having an opinion does not make one a "bigot".
      - yakubin 5y ago
        There is a difference between advocating for free software and saying that all non-free software is evil. To compare to the original meaning of "bigotry", there is a difference between talking about how great your religion is and talking about how all other religions are evil.

isoprophlex 5y ago

Morally, I hope the FSF wins. Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids. The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!

lyptt 5y ago
I like the way you think
cblconfederate 5y ago
Nothing that another ANN can't solve. Humans need not program
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  I guess it's tongue-in-cheek. But you made me imagine the scenario for a movie : once humans start going down that rabbit hole, code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched.
  - stepbeek 5y ago
    Will machines even need clean code? The benefit to a human of clean code is readability. The all-coder will need no such luxuries.
    - worldsayshi 5y ago
      Clean code means fewer states to test to know if it's doing the right thing. Messy code should be more costly to analyze and test.
    - waterhouse 5y ago
      What happens when one all-coder needs to understand or debug another all-coder's code? The definition of "readable" may change, but I imagine there would still be ways of organizing the code that would make it easier or harder. The halting problem would seem to imply that, for any given all-coder, it's possible to obfuscate hard enough to frustrate that all-coder.

cblconfederate 5y ago

copilot looks very cool, but if people end up using it a lot, it probably means their programming language is not expressive enough, after all they were invented in order to be accessible to humans. What i'd like to see is a copilot for scientific papers. There s so much duplication out there that it would be easy to train and it would save tons of time from the chore of writing and referencing the same things over and over

uberswe 5y ago

Copilot is a fancy autocomplete tool for code. I think the controversy comes from it being trained on public repos without adhering to licensing. I used copilot and thought the best part was when it would autocomplete based on other code I was writing. Sometimes the Copilot would help me see places where I had repetitive code which could be turned into a function.

ben-gy 5y ago

I’ve been using copilot for the past couple to months, and it’s seriously becoming a part of my daily coding workflow. The majority of suggestions are not quite what I want but then I’ve found the more I comment my code the more personalised the suggestions get and consequently (as a solo founder in my own startup) copilot finishing my code for me during late nights trying to ship features for customers before the following day is something I have become grateful for. It’s a double edged sword because it’s enabling me to grow my business and remain self employed, but I also understand the concerns and at the end of the day it’s not something I need to do my job (like version control or an IDE for example), but more of a nice to have…

worldsayshi 5y ago
What are your thoughts on the IP though? Aren't you worried that the code you're writing ends up being a huge legal ticking bomb?
- nojito 5y ago
  Only if people are distributing the code. You’d be surprised at how much code is “borrowed”
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
How is it useful to you? It feels like the majority of my coding consists of translating extremely complex business requirements that neither the business people nor me understand 100% into highly specific code that appears to do what we want it to do. How can Copilot help me here?
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Most people are out there making what are essentially wordpress blogs but in a different language.
- dmos62 5y ago
  Once you've figured out an algorithm, you still need to code it. Thinking != coding. Coding is the easy and cheap part.

jfmc 5y ago

Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering. It is unethical and unfair to the open source community. I do not care if it breaks code to bits and recomposes them again regurgitated by <YOUR-LATEST-AI-TECHNIQUE-HERE> in a way that is untraceable: it would not work without learning from our open source code. Code produced by this method should be automatically licensed under the most restrictive license of its input used for learning.

Dylan16807 5y ago
How do you draw the line between allowed learning and disallowed learning? You don't think it's unethical for a human to learn from open source code and then write their own private code, surely?
- jfmc 5y ago
  That is NOT the point. You are allowed to learn whatever you want. What is horribly unethical is not recognizing the life-long effort of the people who wrote the original code and designed the original algorithms. Programmers are not machines. The human *knows* the open source that she/he is reading and she/he can acknowledge it in their own code (either public or private). What is the copyright of code written with copilot? Copilot learns the code and forgets authors. Would you agree if I take your open source project, learn piece by piece, rewrite it from scratch and put my name on it without a single word about your work?
  - Operyl 5y ago
    > Would you agree if I take your open source project, learn piece by piece, rewrite it from scratch and put my name on it without a single word about your work? If it was indeed written from scratch, I see no reason (although it’d feel nice) to credit my original work. Having multiple implementations of an idea is always a great thing.
    - jfmc 5y ago
      How do you separate the implementation from the algorithm/idea? I do not believe that you'd be fine if you invest a significant period of your life on some idea that someone else copies without at least some credit (i.e., replacing your name by theirs?). Nobody works like this unless your time worths nothing or your idea is trivial. Open source would be ruined if everyone believed that copying smart code without recognizing the authors is ethical. Would this kind of copying be fine in software and not in other scientific papers or other industrial processes? Would it be fine if I train copilot on a patent database and start creating new patents (at a rate in which is would be unpractical to determine that it is regurgitating prior art)?

dmos62 5y ago

Could this become something people can't program without? Like imagine being stuck recycling the same programs and paradigms, not being able to move to something new, because Copilot hasn't seen it before.

BenjiWiebe 5y ago
I'd guess yes, for some people. Others, though, will refuse to use copilot out of sheer obstinacy if nothing else. They will produce the new paradigms for copilot to then consume.

donohoe 5y ago

FSF lost all moral authority to call anything ‘unacceptable and unjust’ when it welcomed back Richard Stallman.

docflabby 5y ago

GitHub is now a burning platform for free software - plan according

_pmf_ 5y ago
It SourceForged itself.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

IANAL, but until the question of whether software produced with the aid of Copilot, thus potentially containing LGPL'd, GPL'd or even AGPL'd code fragments (you never know really AIU) is subject to these respective or other copyleft licenses is settled, I think customers are well advised to stay clear of using Copilot. To the best of my knowledge, github won't provide legal shelter if customers are getting sued for xGPL violations; GPL, OTOH, has sufficient case law to make using Copilot very risky.

k__ 5y ago

I think Copilot is a hard problem, maybe it isn't even solvable. Sometimes it blatantly copies GPL code without my knowledge. Sometimes I myself write code that could be part of a GPL code-base, without knowing. Funny thing is, the difference here isn't the actual code that's written, but that Copilot has seen many GPL code bases and I didn't. Sometimes I really have the feeling Copilot understands my code base and suggests code that seems to be custom tailored to it. Albeit in most of the cases it doesn't fit 100%. I think the latter cases are when Copilot shines and doesn't violate GPL code at all, but can I be safe? Probably never.

jeroenhd 5y ago

I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code so they train it almost exclusively on other people's code that they don't care for it it gets stolen. Their assumption seems to be "if Bing can find it, it's up for grabs, no matter the license". Good luck getting the same treatment from MS if you upload the leaked XP kernel to github to make your own fork. I'll accept the ethics of copilot when they add the source code for Windows, Azure and Office to their training set, because only then will MS truly reflect that their model doesn't cross the spirit or even letter of any licensing.

Applejinx 5y ago
I'm curious if they took only the whole of Github after acquiring Github, or if they've taken 'all publically visible code everywhere'. Y'know, as an open source dev who's continued to use Github after Microsoft took it over. I'm curious if I walked right into that one or if it would've made no difference whatsoever.
alkonaut 5y ago
> I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code Microsoft can of course create Copilot using the GitHub code. It’s not publishing any derived work on its own - and this type of access to the code is likely a large part of the reason for buying GitHub in the first place. The only ethical issue for Microsoft here is if Microsoft sells this service (they don’t - yet) and risk including nontrivial code without attribution (seems likely, given the behavior of the preview but if ms for example limits output to a few lines or prevents generating too large chunks verbatim the issue almost disappears). Ethical/legal issues and risks for users of Copilot are much larger, such as if they use it to conjure up a nontrivial snippet and then not research the origin of it. It’s no better than copying it from the original location. Microsoft could probably throw in parts of their closed source in copilot - but not even Microsoft controls that. Third parties have copyrights that prevent it too. But people who keep code in public GitHub repos (I assume) let GitHub do things like train neural nets on it, and Microsoft obviously don’t keep much of the windows or office sources in public GitHub repos.

Accacin 5y ago

To be perfectly honest, I think people will realise it's just not that useful and forget about it pretty quickly Even at my place of work, there were some expressing interest in it, and after playing for an hour or two, haven't touched it since. I get the impression there are more people discussing it than actually using it.

mullikine 5y ago
These language models are not being utilised very well by tools such as copilot because they are not mapping very many functions from the editor to language model. The more functions you map, the more you get out of it. If Copilot's workings were completely open and configurable, you would find that people collectively can work together to map many functions to the language model. They are capable of far greater wonders with deep integration and collaboration. I have tried to demonstrate this with emacs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28045894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28045894
- Accacin 5y ago
  Interesting, thank you.

gibbonsrcool 5y ago

Do we owe all our professors and textbook makers compensation when we make money off our brain neural networks that they trained? Everyone also keeps talking about how bad copilot is. It’s the first step! It’s only going to improve and probably fast, given the potential value creation.

hesk 5y ago

So, I'm reading the linked article by RMS about Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) [1] which is one of the reasons why they object against GitHub Copilot. The key argument why as SaaSS is ethically wrong is because it denies control over a computation that I could do on my own. > "The clearest example is a translation service, which translates (say) English text into Spanish text. Translating a text for you is computing that is purely yours. You could do it by running a program on your own computer, if only you had the right program. (To be ethical, that program should be free.) The translation service substitutes for that program, so it is Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS. Since it denies you control over your computing, it does you wrong. (emphasis mine)" I don't find that argument very convincing because it implicitly assumes that there is no alternative translation program that I could run on my own computer. However, if there is an alternative, then a SaaS offers me choice. I can run a program on my own computer, e.g., if I am concerned about data privacy, or service reliability. The downside is that I have to install and maintain the software on my computer. Or, I could use an external service. The upside is that the barriers of use are minimal. Of all the articles by RMS I have read so far, I find this one the least convincing. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

catern 5y ago

The FSF has made no such statement. This article is complete bullshit and a slanted quote. The FSF said it was unacceptable because it's proprietary, like Github in general. They've made no statement about the specific details of Copilot.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago

The position of the FSF is severely misrepresented by the title. Open the full article, you'll see that all FSF says is GitHub Copilot is proprietary software and SaaS, and all forms of proprietary software and SaaS are unacceptable and unjust. What about the copyright issue of machine learning, then? FSF says it's a new thing with many open questions, they are not really sure, right now they are calling for whitepapers from the public to hear your comments [0]. I think it's a reasonable position to take. Reducing the scope of fair use to strengthen copyleft is a double-edged sword, as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways. It's an issue that requires careful considerations. [0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-white-papers-on-philosophical-and-legal-questions-around-copilot https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...

pessimizer 5y ago
> as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways. Could it? Copyright law is FOSS's only protection. That's why it's witty - copyright law against copyright. Weakening copyright law in an ad hoc way is absolutely not good for FOSS. It's fine to rewrite copyright in a way that explicitly allows things like Copilot, as long as FOSS gets to copy bits of proprietary code, too. Otherwise, after some appeals court judgement that the FOSS community failed to participate in (or even worse, subelements participated in on the wrong side) we're going to end up with a copyright practice that looks like the NFL exception in monopoly law.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago
  > It's fine to rewrite copyright in a way that explicitly allows things like Copilot, as long as FOSS gets to copy bits of proprietary code, too. This is exactly what I was thinking about. If Copilot is fair use, it means that all proprietary source code, as long as they're publicly available to read, will be free to use as training materials for a hypothetical free and open source machine learning project, which I think would be a good thing. An example is a proprietary program released under a restrictive "source available" license, you can read it but not reuse it under any circumstances (and I believe these projects are already included in Copilot's training data). This is why I said fair use can be a good thing and a ruling to reduce the scope of fair use can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community. It would be even better if training from all forms of available proprietary binary code can be fair use, too. It may allow the creation of powerful static binary analysis or code generation tools by learning from essentially all free-to-download proprietary software without copyright restrictions. However, the situation of proprietary binary code is more complicated here. Reverse engineering proprietary binary code is explicitly permitted by the US copyright laws, but the "no reverse engineering" clause in EULA overrides it, and this can be a bad thing. It makes FOSS's fair use right meaningless, meanwhile giving proprietary software vendors a free pass to ignore FOSS licenses. Thus the outcome is unclear, it may go either way, this is why I said such an issue requires careful considerations.

Proven 5y ago

Maybe to some it is, but to many it isn't. The FSF guys are pissed off because this is OSS reuse at industrial scale which cuts them out of the loop. Especially with the trend to use permissive licensing - it's becoming too frictionless for their liking.

exporectomy 5y ago

> The FSF said there are legal questions pertaining to Copilot [...] There have always been lots of untested legal questions about GPL & co. Why hasn't the FSF figured out what it is they do and don't want? Shouldn't knowing what the licenses actually mean and communicating that to people be their number one job? Why else do they exist? To spread feelings and confusion?

vrocmod 5y ago

I’ve been using Copilot for weeks now. It’s definitely useful for building upon what you already wrote. It’s very effective for single lines, but I don’t trust it to come up with entire functions. I tried, but obviously YMMV. The licensing is definitely a problem, but I think that Copilot only highlighted the issue - it didn’t create it. The concept of software license looks pretty fragile to me. You can own software but you can’t really own PL statements. You can own the whole but you can’t really own the atomic parts that make the whole. If so, closed-source is just a way to make you work really hard to achieve a result that someone else already achieved by means of obfuscation and secrecy. I’m not sure where open-source stands. Maybe it’s just a social contract.

hankman86 5y ago

I’d imagine that GitHub will end up re-training Copilot, excluding any “copyleft” licensed code. Not because what they do is legally tainted, but to avoid being berated by the FSF and the bad press that ensues. Once again though, the FSF makes “free software” less relevant and harder to use. Who will want to use such software for anything when being threatened with costly litigation and bad press?

spywaregorilla 5y ago

Tangential, but isn't it kind of weird that Copilot is a code generator and not a style-gann kind of code refactorer? That feels like a much easier task because you get to infer the intent of code from an existing example rather than from context alone.

Applejinx 5y ago
It gives rise to some interesting situations. I'm an open source audio coder. I'm not any great shakes as a programmer but I make my living by regularly coming up with novel ideas, and my codebase is on Github and MIT licensed. Over the course of hundreds of DSP plugins, some key parts are very repetitive. This means that there are audio processing algorithms I do which NOBODY ELSE is doing, because they're unusual and in some ways arbitrarily wrong. They're chosen to produce a particular sound rather than the textbook-correct algorithm output. Example: interleaved IIR filters, to make the audio interact differently in the midrange and produce a lower Q factor at the cost of producing some odd artifacts near the Nyquist frequency. Nobody out there in the normal world or commercial DSP or academia would intend to do that, because there are significant reasons not to (which I work around, in context). But if that stuff appears in Copilot output, they are jacking my INTENT but violating the very lenient MIT license by stripping my credit. They'd also be misleading hapless audio programmers who didn't intend to adopt my techniques, but that's a side issue. I'm interested in who else out there has a substantial codebase subject to Copilot reprocessing, who is demonstrating intent that isn't 'normal' and doesn't exist in the 'normal' world of whatever domain's being coded for. The point is, can it be demonstrated that Microsoft is taking SPECIFIC things from specific open source developers that can be clearly traced back to one source of distinct intentions, and then stripping the licensing? I feel like said intentions cannot be 'normal and industry-standard and correct'. It's gotta be things like my IIR interleaving, where it's a quirky choice you wouldn't automatically do, very likely with costs and consequences in its own right. Something you could choose to adopt if you liked the trade-offs (or in my case, the sound).

i386 5y ago

Copilot is a cool tech demo but it’s a very bad idea to have low skilled developers wire boilerplate code that they can only edit once.

codingdave 5y ago

> The reason is that Copilot requires running software that is not free, such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE or Visual Studio Code editor the FSF contends, and constitutes a “service as a software substitute” meaning it’s a way to gain power over other people’s computing. Hold up a second. So if people have already made the choice to run software that is not free... enhancing their chosen tool set is unjust? (Besides, VS Code is free.) I'm honestly interested in understanding their perspective, but I'm not following the leap from using an extension in VS code to gaining power over other people's computing.

toastal 5y ago
Free as in beer. Their built-in tracking to the editor from Microsoft isn't freedom. There's VS Codium that compiles the MIT project without telemetry, but at that rate, I'd use a different editor.

dangoljames 5y ago

My biggest problem with copilot is not how it's trained, but with it's targeting of microsoft coding tools. I don't use visual anything, and I don't know anyone who does. I code a lot of python, html and JS, and I use neovim. If I need a smart 'crutch' I'll whip out pycharm. Mostly I don't feel the need for such things, but it would be fun and interesting to see just how good copilot is. Not fun enough to install visual whatsit though.

fareesh 5y ago

What seems useful to me is the ability to type in "function that takes the path to an image file and returns a new image file with rounded corners". These are not groundbreaking problems - I'm generally looking for solution out there that uses a popular library. This is especially useful if it's a language where I'm not up to date on the de-facto library of choise is for various use-cases. In most cases, especially while prototyping I'm not going to write it myself, nor care about which library - I'm far more concerned with some big picture goal. If someone builds a product that can do the work of Googling a solution for me, that's the draw of the product. The code is freely available anyway.

darepublic 5y ago

When tech such as copilot truly comes into its own it should be a productivity silver bullet. I hope at that point I will have access to it. At the point we have senior software engineer coding as a service if I had it just for myself I would hoard and not be quick to share