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Re:What Copilot means for open source by q-big on Saturday June 25, 2022 @06:39PM (#31879323)
> You can make a model that is trained only with BSD and MIT code, and IIRC/IIUC the result can be used with any license, including proprietary code.

BSD and MIT license still require attribution of the used source code (there exists a MIT No Attribution License, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MIT_License&oldid...).

Re:What Copilot means for open source by mbreese on Saturday June 25, 2022 @08:17PM (#31879863)
> BSD and MIT license still require attribution of the used source code

Which in this scenario could be accomplished by starting that “this software contains algorithmically generated code that was trained using MIT derived code from X, Y, and Z.

This attribution list would be very long, but it could be done.

I think the interesting thing here would be to compare the generated code with the original training data after the fact. If the generated code does not already exist (with some degree of similarity), then it would be okay to use. Otherwise, if it did already exist, you’d then need to attribute the authors of the chunk of code — which you’d now know.

I’m not discounting the hurdles involved, but there might be ways to overcome them.

Re:What Copilot means for open source by jimmySixDOF on Saturday June 25, 2022 @08:23PM (#31879889)
Whats to stop them from just making a huge attribution page with every possible instance and a vague statement like "the following may or may not have been incorporated in part or in whole" ?
Re:What Copilot means for open source by jacobolus on Saturday June 25, 2022 @08:52PM (#31880034)
They’d be gambling that such a crummy attribution would hold up in court. Generally judges aren’t too amused by people’s efforts to find wacky loopholes that make a mockery of the law.

On the other hand, open source licenses haven’t been tested thoroughly in court, so maybe the result would be to throw out such attribution requirements entirely. The main relevant case to date is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobsen_v._Katzer

Re:What Copilot means for open source by wolpoli on Saturday June 25, 2022 @07:02PM (#31879447)
Great. Now developers will need to check license compatibility before picking the copilot model.

In reality through, we'll all just end up using the MIT No Attribution License copilot.

Re:What Copilot means for open source by q-big on Saturday June 25, 2022 @07:27PM (#31879589)
Developers already have to check license compatibility. If copilot implemented such a feature, this would just represent the status quo.
Re:What Copilot means for open source by xigoi on Sunday June 26, 2022 @04:37AM (#31882148)
> In reality through, we'll all just end up using the MIT No Attribution License copilot.

Great, so GPL code would be left alone. I don't see how that's a bad thing.