[lindenksv85]

I think it’s important to recognize that most ML models will not be built in top of copyleft material. It will mostly use data that we as users have voluntarily provided to someone at some point and to which that platform now claims ownership. So we need to think long and hard about whether or not we believe any of these models should receive any copyright protection at all and in a much broader context. I think if we insist on claiming that copilot is copyrightable itself and should be under GPL then we have totally capitulated with respect to all other use cases in a way that actually further protects incumbent advantage for large companies and which deprived everyone else of any benefit or remuneration for their own data. You’re basically saying it’s ok for companies to privatize the collective knowledge of all of humanity. I’m not on board with that.

[guitarbill]

I don't know if by "You’re basically saying" you mean me specifically, but if you do, you're dead wrong. I'm not ok with this at all. However, I'm not so stupid to think me, as a non-IP lawyer can make sense of the current legal situation (which is what copyright is; law) or even propose new laws.

However, as a dev I can think about it and say "to me, this is immoral and unethical", and refuse to use Copilot, not work for any company that uses Copilot, not use GitHub/Microsoft products, pull code from GitHub (if I had any), and decide not to open source stuff in future. Ethics has always been underemphasised in software compared to other engineering disciplines.

Generally, non-technical people are (more) impacted by ML, but in this case it's us as developers and our open source communities. So I hope devs will give it some thought this time. And if this leads to devs thinking about ML more carefully in general, great. Things don't have to be illegal to be unethical.

[lindenksv85]

I didn’t mean you specifically. I think the ethical conversation is more interesting but I also think that people will feel different if, say, the Linux Foundation releases its own version of copilot and it’s not just one company reaping the rewards of all that code. And I’d like to make it easy for other competitors to do exactly that. It will be harder for them to do that if we think that the models themselves are copyrightable. I don’t think something like copilot is going to make anyone think twice 5 yrs from now any more than we think twice about something like google autocomplete or google search thumbnail images. I think stuff like copilot if properly tuned won’t be providing a substitute for whole GPL projects. I don’t think OSS communities will be damaged by this in any way. In fact those same oss communities are going to be some of the biggest users of these sorts of tools just like they use stackoverflow today.

[erhk]

Github is not required to open source your work