All software licences are based on copyright, same as writing, art, music, etc. Some software licences are permissive. Some writing is permissive (e.g. Cory Doctorow). Some music is permissive (e.g. Amanda Palmer). It entirely depends on what the author wants. The fact that more software is permissive is a good thing, right?

I entirely agree that there are ethical problems with training AI on copyrighted training data. But please let's not start gatekeeping this. We need to have a serious discussion as a culture about it, and saying "you're way down the list of victims" isn't helping.

The tech community has a tendency to not care about issues like this until it effects us. I’m not telling people to shut up about this. I’m saying don’t be a hypocrite. If this is the wrong approach for GitHub, it is a problem with the way all these AI are trained.

You are allowed to care about the things you care about and not have a concrete well-informed opinion on something related that might be more pressing. It only becomes hypocricy as soon as you actively dismiss the other thing as if you were well-informed. And I don't see anyone here doing that.

Broken logic.

What I disagree with is the idea, that they should therefore not complain, or that there could not be an AI system, that does not code laundering, but keeps licenses in place and does this ethically and in an honest way. Adding "ethically" and "honest way", because I am sure that companies will try to find a way around being honest, if they ever are forced to add back the licenses.

In fact, artists might not be the group, that grasps the impact of training on that corpus as quickly as the dev communities. Perhaps it is exactly the devs, who need to complain loudest and first, to have a signal effect.