News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:GitHub Copilot emits GPL code by blibble on Friday April 21, 2023 @03:17PM (#35658638)
> If Codeium doesn't produce these when producing "verbatim enough" snippets, how is this actually better, besides avoiding a GPL boogeyman?

it's not

if they've trained on MIT/Apache 2.0/... then they're just as liable as people that have trained on GPL

they would be limited to training on licenses that don't require attribution (BSD2, public domain, etc)

which I suspect limits the size of the training set so much that the output would be useless

Codium here is unintentionally making an argument that undermines legal confidence in their own product

interesting choice!

Re:GitHub Copilot emits GPL code by gus_massa on Friday April 21, 2023 @03:57PM (#35659153)
IANAL, but I expect people to use MIT/BSD to be less angry about partial reuse of the code than people that uses GPL.
Re:GitHub Copilot emits GPL code by pornel on Friday April 21, 2023 @04:39PM (#35659765)
I'm not a lawyer either, but I don't think "less angry" is a legal term.
Re:GitHub Copilot emits GPL code by JamesBarney on Friday April 21, 2023 @05:56PM (#35660768)
Not but it's big determinant in how you get sued. Several lawyers haven give the advice the best way to avoid a lawsuit is don't be an asshole. The second best way is to spend a bunch of money on an attorney.
Re:GitHub Copilot emits GPL code by GuB-42 on Friday April 21, 2023 @04:53PM (#35659946)
I wonder if, in order to deal with attribution, the system could simply build a multi-megabyte file with "this code is derived from:" followed by all the authors the system could gather from the training data set.
Re:GitHub Copilot emits GPL code by dalmo3 on Friday April 21, 2023 @05:15PM (#35660291)
Hey, I want my name on that list. Here's my contribution:

    {