lindenksv1
lindenksv1 on Hacker News
Posted by
lindenksv1 on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @06:36PM
from the katedowninglaw.com dept.
I am a lawyer and tried to find this new language but none of the legal documents I looked at appear to be updated to reflect any of this. Microsoft has a lot of different docs and it's a little confusing but the ones for Copilot are straightforward and none of those have changed any indemnity-related provisions since the spring.
Posted by
lindenksv1 on Thursday May 11, 2023 @11:53AM
from the katedowninglaw.com dept.
OP here. If you own the copyright to a work, you can license it in any way you like. You can offer it to some people under a commercial license and to other people under an open source license. Many entities practices dual (or tri or whatever) licensing. When you post things on GitHub, you are essentially dual licensing your work. You're providing it under a very broad license to GitHub and you are providing it under an OSS license (or whatever you like) to other GitHub users. Neither license takes precedence. One license applies to one group of people and the other license applies to the other group of people.
This is very similar to what happens when you sign a contributor agreement before contributing code to an open source project. When you sign the contributor agreement, you're granting a very broad license to your work to the project maintainers. They can then license your work out under any license they want. But likewise, because you are not granting them an exclusive license, you're free to put your contribution license out into the world under any license of your choosing separate and apart from the project that you contributed it to.
Technically, I think the scenario you're describing with AGPL code may well be possible and legal. But practically, I think people would stop using GitHub if they felt that doing so would lead to GitHub/Microsoft undercutting their projects, stealing their customers, or essentially stripping the project of any AGPL obligations. I think that from a business perspective, they're really gambling on the idea that developers will see Copilot as a big boon rather than a value suck. Time will tell whether their gamble has paid off.
Kate Downing here. This is an excellent question. So, just like YouTube, GitHub would likely argue that they are protected by the DMCA and that so long as they comply with DMCA take-down requests, they are not liable for copyright infringement (direct or indirect) for third party content posted to GitHub by people other than the copyright owners. Remember that the DMCA effectively shifts that due diligence you speak of away from providers of online services and onto copyright holders themselves. Without the DMCA, many businesses that rely on user-generated content just wouldn't exist because that due diligence isn't possible at scale - it's often not even possible for individual pieces of content because the publication of any copyrighted work can be very obscure and because in the US you can hold a copyright without formally registering it.
In practice, I think the entire open source world knows that people post each other's open source code on GitHub. Even projects that have very purposefully chosen to primarily use other services or self-host their source code are well aware that their code gets mirrored on GitHub and/or included in other people's repos on GitHub. Up until now, I don't think this has been controversial and I don't think GitHub gets a lot of takedown requests for this practice. I think most developers see this as a feature, not a bug. Copilot might make people rethink whether or not they want to start sending take-down requests but that'll be a tough call for a lot of people because withholding code from GitHub to avoid its usage in Copilot also effectively means making their code less easily available to the rest of the world. It may be very disruptive to other projects that include the copyright owner's code in their own projects.
Posted by
lindenksv1 on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @01:40PM
from the medium.com dept.
Posted by
lindenksv1 on Monday June 17, 2019 @02:07PM
from the katedowninglaw.com dept.
Posted by
lindenksv1 on Monday June 17, 2019 @02:05PM
from the katedowninglaw.com dept.
Posted by
lindenksv1 on Tuesday March 19, 2019 @04:35PM
from the medium.com dept.
The problem is that they continue to be pushed out further and further from their jobs every year because cities like Palo Alto keep adding thousands of jobs and almost no housing. That means professionals like me get pushed out of PA, move somewhere cheaper, and end up pushing out people that make less. All of these things are tied together and at the end of the domino what you get is homelessness which we've seen spike in the last 5 years.
The point is that if two professional salaries aren't enough to buy a home in Palo Alto, then it highlights how much everyone else must be struggling. It highlights just how far away all of our service workers must live. Highlights just how miserable housing prices and commutes have gotten for the vast majority of people in the Bay Area who aren't lucky enough to have two professional salaries. If two professionals are, according to you, expected to have a half an hour commute, then everyone else is melting into their car seats every day.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Yes, I personally can go live 30 minutes away. So how far away should the teachers live, then? The police? Because if I can afford San Mateo, then that means they largely can't. So where are they going? Is it acceptable for them to be coming up to PA from Gilroy? Tracy? Stockton? At what point do we say that we've created a ridiculous system in which people are needlessly spending years of their lives in traffic and throwing rent money in the toilet all because we can't build some more apartment building next to our jobs centers? I'm not insisting that city work live or own in PA, I'm highlighting that they can't own anywhere near PA, since, as you state, even 30 minutes out of PA is where two-income professionals can afford, not them.
You can only build multifamily housing in 3% of the city. It's illegal everywhere else. You can't build more than 3 stories in most places - it's illegal. The supreme cost of housing here comes partially from the fact that you can only build a tiny number of units on land that could otherwise hold much more. So you split the cost of land among, say, 5 condos, and not 20. If you're paying 1/5 of the cost of the land and not 1/20 of the cost of the land when you buy your condo, it's obviously much more expensive.
The problem in the Bay Area is that since 2010, we added about 500,000 jobs and only 50,000 housing units. Roughly speaking, jobs gives you a sense for demand and housing units give you a sense for supply. Our jobs-housing ratio is completely out of whack. That's what makes the Bay Area so expensive. I actually don't believe any of the nonsense about this being a "destination area" or that there is "insatiable demand" - the demand is directly driven by job growth and you can see that plainly. People are not moving here from Nebraska and taking on housing that is multiple times more expensive just because it's pretty here- they're doing it because they got a job offer here. So no, Topeka and Detroit don't have this problem because their jobs growth isn't so far out of whack from their housing growth.
It didn't when we were looking. We didn't see a single property come up on the downtown side of El Camino. We would have liked that, but we didn't see it. And also $2M would also not have been within the band we were looking for.
Business relationships are also relationships. The first people a small company hires are the people they're friends with or friendly with. The people who invest in you are more likely to be your social acquaintances or friends. You won't even get a meeting with an investor in many cases unless you have a common connection. Partnerships are formed all the time between people who also are on the same soccer team, etc. People in business also have people they like and that they don't like and that they're friends with outside of work. I have coworkers, but I also go to their BBQs and their birthday parties - they're still human beings. When people are entrusting each other with the fates of their companies, their employees, and their own personal wealth, they need a high degree of trust.
You sound like someone who has never actually had to work in a multinational company before or with remote team members. Anyone who has can tell you that things are much easier when co-workers know each other personally and become friendly with each other than when they're just strangers to you on the other end of the email. It changes how you respond to them.How likely you are to misunderstand them. How likely you are to respond with kindness or terseness. And it changes how you feel about your job in general. When you go into work and you like the people you work with and you consider yourself their friend, you're far more likely to like your job overall and stay there. If you treat your entire work life as a "transaction" then you're far less likely to be happy with your work life.
NO ONE is talking about the city providing anyone with housing. This is not about government subsidized housing. It's just about the city allowing people to build housing on the land that they own. Just permitting people to build.
Yes, I can rent. I can rent until I die. But how bizarre is it that you are telling me and everyone else who isn't wealth enough to have bought a house yet that we "insist" on buying and we should be happy to rent forever when we spent decades telling the baby boomers the exact opposite? As a country, we recognize the wealth building aspect of home ownership. We recognize the stability it gives people who don't have to worry about rent increases and who don't have to worry about pulling their kids out of their school. We see the value of people leaving their kids with homes after they die, not dusty rent checks. We recognize the value of people putting down roots in their community and investing in it. We gave the baby boomers the mortgage interest rate deduction, Prop 13, and the GI bill and numerous other programs to make sure that everyone in the middle class could have a home to call their own.
Now you're saying that it was fine for the American dream for boomers to involve home ownership but if a Millennial wants the same benefits then they're "entitled" and "insisting"?
The absurd cost of housing in this country and the declining rates of homeownership are directly tied to the massive divergence we're seeing between rich and poor in this country and the shrinking middle class. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/19/meet-...
The problem with the "will of the people" is outlined here pretty well:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/10/why-c...A small minority of NIMBY homeowners can capture and control a city council fairly easily. When you are well off (and are retired or independently wealthy and don't work...) and you're in a town of 65,000, that really means there are maybe at most 1000 people actually going to City Council and paying any attention to it. That means that if you've lived there for 30 years, you know all of them and your networks are very deep. So, a small minority who has time and resources can effect a lot. And meanwhile young people, working people, people with young kids, people working 2-3 jobs, etc they're not paying attention, they don't have those deep networks, and frankly they only show up to vote in presidential elections. Plus, people who like how things are going, don't really dig into this stuff and have no reason to think anything is wrong. If you think Palo Alto "is on fire" and "going to hell in a hand basket" because you have to drive by a new apartment building, then you show up to council and you show up to vote. But if you have no issue with new buildings, you've got no reason to show up and you're far less concerned with voting. So, problem #1 is that people who are most affected are not paying attention or do not know that they should be paying attention.
Problem #2 is as outlined in the article above. When every city council is captured by existing homeowners, no town decides to add housing. Every town prefers to add jobs that bring in tax revenues but thinks they have little to gain from allowing more housing, because of the attendant infrastructure costs (like new schools). And so collectively, they make choices that drive up the cost of housing, drive people away from jobs centers, create homelessness, and which contribute to income inequality as people spend more and more money on housing because of an artificial constraint on housing supply. Added together, this stuff hurts our economy and it's killing off the middle class.
Industries are successful when they cluster. It's why you see entertainment in LA, insurance in Chicago, biotech in North Carolina, banks in NY, and think tanks and defense contractors in DC. As we move away from manufacturing and into a knowledge economy, being able to quickly exchange and improve on ideas with other people becomes more and more valuable. It's why the entire world is seeing a massive movement toward urbanization. We are not going to see high tech companies set up in places with few potential employees, no research universities, no investors, and no potential partners. It's simply not going to happen even if it looks like the easy way out. If you consider your own fortunes and you consider joining a young up and coming company that is risky because it has a high chance of failure, I think you'll find you are much more comfortable with that risk if your town has hundreds of other employers for you to go to afterwards, rather than just a small handful. The Internet does not and cannot replace the connections you form by accidentally meeting people at coffee shops or parties. Knowing and seeing people on the street in real life has more value and builds more trust than a text message. Do you think that calling your mom is the same thing as visiting her in person? Do you think you could be a good parent via Skype? Of course not. So why do you think that business relationships are any different?
There is no free market in housing. Supply is very tightly constrained by the city via a system of very stringent zoning (3 stories max most of the city, only 3% of the city is even zone for multifamily housing) and taxes. What you see happening in the Bay Area isn't the result of the laws of supply and demand, it's the result of the laws passed by city councils. There's no developer in the world who wouldn't love to build more housing in one of the most booming places in the country. They're not not doing it because it doesn't make financial sense or because there's no demand there. They're not doing it because the housing market in the Bay Area has been regulated to death.
We're moving to Santa Cruz because we wanted to live in a walkable area. If you travel up and down the peninsula, any house near the walkable downtown area is going to be $2M+. Yeah, sure, you can buy for less and have to travel by car absolutely everywhere. But why spend $1.5 to live in a dead cul de sac when you can spend the same money to live in a lively walkable area near the beach? If you're going to hang an albatross around your neck, you better think it's awesome. We're sick of driving everywhere and we want our kids to be able to go bike around the neighborhood safely.
Hey there. I'm Kate Downing. I don't insist on living in Palo Alto at all. See? I'm moving. But what I'm trying to say is that we have a serious problem because people who are integral to our community who SHOULDN'T move can't afford it. You can tell lawyers and engineers to go get lost and they don't HAVE to buy a house in Palo Alto. But are you also going to tell our police, firemen, teachers, city staff, nurses and EMTs to get lost, too? They all make less than we do. What happens when they follow your advice?
This article misses the forest for the trees - the question of why we have a housing deficit in the first place. And it's not because thousands of coastal cities forgot to build housing and only the author noticed. It's because they're mostly run by NIMBYs who've spent decades actively opposing new housing construction near existing jobs centers. So I don't know how the author gets from "we have a deficit" to "therefore there will be a construction boom." As long as the city governments remain controlled by NIMBY homeowners, there will be no housing boom in coastal cities.