Not even copyleft licenses prohibit somebody from earning money from what you released, and that includes Microsoft. The idea behind free software is that it benefits all users equally, even if other developers get the biggest direct benefit.

The best question to ask yourself is if you would be annoyed as much if a company like Black Duck did a similar training or analysis with their OpenHub (openhub.net)?

I think one could even make a case for training an AI in this manner from the leaked Windows code: copyright law treats these generally as "fair use", though how you gained the copy of the code might still be illegal.

IANAL though :)

You need to comply with license first before you can use it to defense your position.

Copilot doesn't comply with opensource licenses, so authors of Copilot lost the right to use opensource licensed code permanently, until they settle the case with authors of the code.

CC-BY-NC explicitly prohibits commercial usage.

It’s also common to see GPL license for non-commercial usage and paid licenses for commercial usage.

Dual licensing with a copyleft license is common if you want to offer an ability for someone to develop a closed-source project: they can perfectly develop a GPL-licensed commercial project without paying anything.

If CC-BY-NC prohibits commercial use, it is not an open source or free software license (which have compatible definitions, but differ in motivations).

AFAIK, Creative Commons was set to create a set of licenses in the spirit of open source for creative works, and I wouldn't expect them to be open source at all.

> I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code

You are likely using the wrong license then.

Copilot doesn't comply with all open source licenses. Which one we should use then to protect our rights?

Did you license your code under terms that allowed them to do so?

Most licenses would require attribution and some notion of the license(s) of the code behind the suggestion.

Screwing over the little guy because he didn’t spend enough time contemplating possible legal troubles with his OS software seems, again, ethically dubious at best.

I wonder if they could generate the correct license to code copilot produces, and maybe even infer the preferred one from repo and generate code that is restricted to that?

It doesn't matter what you want. You released your code under an open source license. What matters now is what the license says.

Well, the license probably requires attribution. Can you point to Copilot fulfilling that requirement?

Then you should have never released it.

Fairly straight forward solution to your very unique problem.

The license for my software was written in a world where AI was not being used to replace me with my own code. Whatever license was chosen, was chosen to deal with the questions and issues known at the time.

It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works.

Furthermore, law is not ethics. I said it’s ethically questionable because that’s what matters. Not if a court will find Microsoft guilty of some kind of overreach.

Anybody with even passing knowledge of law knows this, so please, stuff it somewhere.

> It’s such a BS argument to say “your license didn’t anticipate the future, it’s your fault.” No, that’s not how law works.

It literally is though.

You don't get to change your mind on an agreement because something happened that you didn't expect.