Re:Coping with Copilot
by cmrdporcupine on Saturday August 20, 2022 @10:44PM
(#32536968)
Your argument fails to distinguish between "open source" and "free software".
Copyleft, free software, GPL style licenses do not have their source open purely for the purpose of studying and modifying. Their licenses also require that derivative works also be free and that such modifications be distributed.
Copilot does not comply with this. And so violates the spirit of those licenses, and probably also the letter of the law.
Open source is usually referring to the OSI definition which is essentially identical to the FSF “free software” term.
And by that logic, gpt3 and dall-e are also copyright violations. Except this has never been proven to be the case.
I literally use “libre” and “gratis” to make that precise distinction.
And it’s at best questionable whether copilot is derivative of the code it is trained on.
I just don't understand the OSS community sometimes. "Software should be open and free (libre) for me to study and modify" includes what Github did for copilot. If you don't want your software to be free (in either sense), don't host it on an open source platform, especially one that makes it available gratis to the public.
There's possibly a valid argument that any private repo code that was used for copilot doesn't fit the proper definition of "open" (or gratis). But I haven't actually read the Github license around this, so I don't know.