Re:An Open Source Lawyer’s View on the Copilot Class Action ...
by VBprogrammer on Thursday November 10, 2022 @01:00PM
(#33550503)
Private isn't a useful distinction though right? Even open source code often has a licence and conditions on how you can reuse or integrate it into your own code. Someone owns it.
If you sell a product which can regurgitate large parts of code who's licence doesn't allow it to be completely freely used and modified then this kind of outcome seems a foregone conclusion.
Re:An Open Source Lawyer’s View on the Copilot Class Action ...
by IshKebab on Friday November 11, 2022 @03:22AM
(#33558407)
> Private isn't a useful distinction though right?
Yes it is. If code is public you can't necessarily use or copy the code (depending on the license) but there's nothing stopping you reading it and learning how it works and any secrets contained in it (e.g. information about future products).
There's a reason most proprietary software isn't "source available".
> If you sell a product which can regurgitate large parts of code who's licence doesn't allow it to be completely freely used and modified
Yes but they don't do that. I'm not sure why people are finding this so hard to understand.
Microsoft isn't going to train Copilot on Windows code for the same reason it didn't train it on private repos: the code is private and they don't want to risk leaking private code.
I imagine there would be no problem training it on e.g. the Unreal Engine code which is not open source but is available to read.
The big practical issue is that there's no warning when Copilot produces code that might violate copyright, so you're taking a bit of a risk if you use it to generate huge chunks of code as-is. I imagine they are working on a solution to that though. It's not difficult conceptually.