Re:Copilot sells code other people wrote
by PaulKeeble on Thursday June 23, 2022 @01:26PM
(#31852377)
Microsoft could have trained this on their own code and there would be no issue. The problem is instead of doing that they knew full well the approach would reproduce the code and they decided they would rather breach GPL than expose their own code. But I bet Microsoft has more than enough lines to train an AI, there was a clear choice to breach other peoples licenses in preference.
Huh... These comments have given me an idea: MS needs to be forced to train a model to compensate (pay) code authors and codebases based on snippet suggestions given by their tool: the Spotify model replacing Napster!
Re:Copilot sells code other people wrote
by sirsinsalot on Thursday June 23, 2022 @01:38PM
(#31852549)
See: Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier
The comment you replied to gave you that idea nearly word for word..
I've not installed or used it for the same reason (don't want to use AGPL or GPLd code by accident, and don't want my closed source code to be used accidentally as well), but the thought of Copilot being "killed" due to litigation/copyright/licensing issues is sad.
For me, It's kind of like when MP3 first appeared: Sharing music in Napster or downloading Mp3s from Geocities was just amazing. The idea of having such things at your fingertips. Even though I understood the issue the authors had with the unpaid distribution of their music... still, the idea of "what could be..." made it amazing.
I guess Microsoft could be a bit forward thinking, and implement the "Spotify" model in code: Pay OpenSource developers (whoever owns the repo, or whoever made a commit?) a small amount whenever their code gets used through Copilot.
I'm super excited by how "Copilot" related services will look like in 10 years. And I really really hope that the technology/idea doesn't get killed by litigation.