[ThrowawayR2]

> "However - Copilot directly recites code."

Sounds like that wouldn't be difficult to fix? Transform the code to an intermediate representation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation) as a pre-processing stage, which ditches any non-essential structure of the code and eliminates comments, variable names, etc., before running the learning algorithms on it. Et voila, much like a human learning something and reimplementing it, only essential code is generated without any possibility of accidentally regurgitating verbatim snippets of the source data.

[salawat]

At that point, can we all just agree IP is the stupidest concept to ever be layered on top of math (which programming is) and move on with non-copyrightable code?

[jcheng]

Only if you agree that copyleft licenses are also stupid; without copyright, there's no way to prevent companies from making closed-source forks of code you wrote and intended to stay open.

[ThrowawayR2]

The whole point of copyleft was as a stepping stone to get to RMS's four freedoms (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html) which effectively eliminates copyright for software.

[jcheng]

Freedom 1: “Access to the source code is a precondition”

With no copyright/copyleft, how do you enforce the rule that derived works must provide access to the source code? I’ve never heard that copyleft was a stepping stone—rather, it’s the stick that fully realizes the four freedoms.

[salawat]

Correct. Copyleft is idiocy as well. You don't really need a pay for a proprietary fork of a tool when no one can keep you out of the free one, and the proprietary stuff diffuses into the free option.

[oefnak]

Yes, sure. Without copyright there's no need for copyleft left, right?

[jcheng]

No...? Not unless that closed-source project's source code is leaked?

[BlueTemplar]

You don't care about attribution and other moral rights ?

(I guess these are going to depend a LOT on the jurisdiction that you're in ?)

[salawat]

I care, but in the long run, I care more about our descendants not having tools locked out of their hands. Facilitated information asymmetry is the root of far too many evils.

Where is your ego when you're dead and gone? Where could we be if the majority of human advancement we're not tightly clutched as trade secrets?

As someone who has done paid software engineering (yes, you can feel free to call me a hack or sell out if you wish), I've come to find that the salary I've pulled over the years has not gone to me... But keeping a roof over those I love, helping other people's projects grow, giving people a shot, etc.

My time on the other hand, gets dumped into implementing the same handful of processes doing the same damn thing, but different this time, because you can't just bloody make "Here ya go, here's your Enterprise-in-a-box".

I'd like people more people able to solve novel problems than necessarily need to retread the same path over and over. Some degree of that will always have to be done to keep the skills fresh in the population, but we could do way better at marshaling that split, and I'm convinced part of what necessitates it is creating artificial barriers through things like enforced implementation monopolization. Yes. It ensures a minimum level of novelty and variance across populations, but it also does terribly at not consuming the finite amount of human capacity for truly novel thought to innovate.

It may make societies that function based on greed and economic/fiscal measures work, but I'm not convinced other incentive structures won't keep the rolling stone of innovation from accruing moss.

[BlueTemplar]

I don't understand what you're talking about, I'm talking about the non-commercial parts of the monopoly rights that are copyrights and patents, the non-commercial parts arguably aren't going to restrict the users much, and their commercial parts are temporary by design.

(Copyright has went IMHO overboard with its duration, we should scale to back to the original 14 years renewable once, just like patents, but copyright doesn't apply to processes anyway, and so arguably it shouldn't apply to software that can't claim to have any artistic merit.)