[youareawesome]

Regardless of whether or not the output of Copilot is sufficiently "crow-like," the reality is that Copilot would not exist without its corpus of largely GPL-licensed code. Training data has value and many companies go to great lengths to hoard data for this exact reason. If Copilot is then offered for a price, GitHub is profiting from the work of thousands who never intended their code to be used in this way.

[nullc]

The flip side is that if, from a policy perspective, we decide that the licensing doesn't matter-- then it's extremely likely that anyone else can make a copilot competitor.

If we decide that licensing is required, it's likely that no one except github (or a few other huge players) could ever make something like this just due to access to the code.

(Github would make it a requirement of the TOS that your code is licensed to allow copilot to use it, and require users to indemnify github from third party legal action arising from github using code you posted in copilot.)

The permissive handling levels the playing field.

[dannyw]

no, if github does that the entire open source community will move to GitLab, much like the freenode to libera exodus.

[nullc]

Already their TOS gives them broad permissions, it just stops short of indemnification. Their TOS arguably already turns people posting projects containing third party copylefted code into license violators, -- yet people are still using them.

So I wouldn't be so sure-- but moreover, I think my larger point remains: the entire world being fragmented into separate licensing is a huge moat.