[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