The hurdle for getting copyright are pretty low (of course that also means any compensation by a court would be low).
Anything that is not technical ly required (or deviates from some generic standard) but involves some aesthetic considerations is a already potentially copyrightable.
Because the boundaries are so fuzzy no sane company lawyer would allow the use of CoPilot . Why take a risk for some glorified text snippets?
> Why take a risk for some glorified text snippets?
Name an example where that was actually an issue. And I'm talking explicitly about single functions and even single lines of code.
Microsoft's programmers were (are?) not allowed to read GPL code to rule out any doubt that they might be copy GPL code into the codebase, even if only unconsciously.
Lawyers are not just for suing they are also for covering your ass so there is no way you could lose if you are getting sued.
I really doubt that. I do think the reaction would be more favorable if the project was itself open source.
It isn't even new at all [0], [1], [2] - it's just getting exposure because people start actually using it.
GPT-3 still forms the basis of Codex, which is the basis of CoPilot. None of these are Open Source and even if they were - what exactly do you think that would change? The models are black boxes, they are too big to even run on consumer level hardware, let alone train or finetune and the code of CoPilot is most likely just API calls, glue code, some post-processing and integration into VS Code.
In short, no I don't agree that an open source product would've helped with people's opinion and it would've been irrational even, because there'd still be no difference in the core functionality and what people are complaining about.
A single function, even if particularly clever, elegant, or performant, doesn't have much value on its own. Sure, you might have thought about it for hours and struggled hard to get it just right, but that doesn't imply it's particularly valuable on its own.
A particular inverse square root function has no use outside a complete library or program. It's that added value (embedding it as part of something much bigger or complex) together with unrelated work (e.g. API calls, artwork, game design, etc.) that generates a product with actual value.
There are people who unironically try to argue that choosing variable names and expressing trivial mathematical relations in a particular way holds intellectual value worth protecting; even if it's just a single line of code.
Interestingly people cheered when Google won against Oracle and APIs remained "free". It'd be so interesting to take a peek into an alternate reality where CoPilot has been released by Google or Tesla(!) instead of Microsoft. My gut feeling is that the reaction would've been very different depending on the company that released the tool.