We cannot (are not allowed to, by law, contracts etc.) open source everything we write. I think the most important contribution is not funding but to contribute in some way or another for most.
Having said that, it is disheartening that important projects lack even basic funding. Is this getting better? There are also success stories that pop up with funding and donations becoming easier.
For companies open source funding can be a major thing to improve their relationship with the wider software community. It is a signal that they are interested in sustainability of software and collaboration. And it is a form of recognition for the authors.
Edit:
I just realized we are talking about GitHub here. They are a major contributor to open and free software as they provide free hosting and tooling. I'm not saying this absolves them of everything they do with Copilot, but I'm very, very happy to have such an amazing service freely available and many others are too.
Edit: I don't really know what things would be like without GitHub. Same with YouTube and Facebook. I don't assume any of these have a net positive impact, though.
The fact that the license allows you to do this is great; the fact that people actually do is not.
Only if the code is distributed. SaaS can be (and is) used to get around this.
It is still quite rude to do that though.
If I copy the code line by line with my eyes and keyboard, then the code briefly doesn't exist, but the instructions to recreate it do. Copying it is then a two-phase process: first I read the code, then I type it in. It is clear that I'm allowed to look at the code, so it's the action of typing it in that violates copyright. In the same way, distributing Copilot doesn't necessarily break copyright, but using it may.
Copyright was established (much) after the printing press made copying so easy.
We now need protection against machine learning (learnright?) because the only way to not work for Microsoft for free now is to not release your source code... so not open source. Remember when people said that Microsoft changed its mind on open source?
https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status/14109710611816816...
This is just business as usual for tech companies though. How many Silicon Valley businesses built their products on top of open source projects without contributing much back? Heck.. how many YC companies do that? When you see vital open source projects like OpenSSL struggling to raise more than a few tens of thousands in donations (it only continues through OSF contracting work), and libraries like Svelte barely clearing $30k, when you know they're used by Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc you can't be that surprised when companies do the same thing on a larger scale.
The entire tech industry and all the multi-trillion and multi-billion dollar unicorn businesses that have billionaire founders and millionaire developers working at them fall under the description of "would not be possible without public, open-source code" and "will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data."
We can't reasonably claim there's anything wrong with a company building a product on the back of open source work when literally all of us do that as well. The only difference with Copilot is scale.