They haven't made their mind yet on the licensing problem:
>With all these questions, many of them with legal implications [..] there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software.
Their unacceptable and unjust opinion is just from the licensing of GitHub CoPilot / Visual Studio Code itself:
>We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned.
Copilot is an autocompletion framework the way Google is an autocompletion framework.
Both are driven by vast amount of data processing that can't be done locally both because you don't have the horsepower and you don't have the bandwidth or pragmatic data access to terabytes of source code.
So instead of vacuous appeals to emotion, it's better to justify our opinions with objective reasons other than "but I want to have this". We all want things, but we're not entitled to them.
Aside from the fact Copilot literally can only be offered as a service due to its nature (unless you want to sound like one of those jokes where "you downloaded the internet to your USB stick"), everyone is free to offer a service precisely how they decide.
They're not obligated to give you anything they don't want to. They don't have to listen to you, or FSF, or anyone else about what they consider, arbitrarily, an "absolute disgrace". You use it or you don't use it. Simple as that.
P.S.: I consider it an absolute disgrace ice-cream is not free but this argument never seems to works in practice.
> They're not obligated to give you anything they don't want to. They don't have to listen to you, or FSF, or anyone else about what they consider, arbitrarily, an "absolute disgrace". You use it or you don't use it. Simple as that.
No, it's not. The discussion that we're having is over whether this is permissible or not, and the lobbying that groups such as the FSF are doing is in support of a different set of rules to be enforced.
FSF considers many things not permissible, that thrive despite their harsh judgment. So what's the purpose of saying "permissible" then? According to whom and why?
FSF is an ideological organization, they're a bit like the religious equivalent of some clergy in the far East.
Yes I know a circle of people respect FSF a lot and pay attention every time they wave their fingers at someone. The same is also true of the ayatollah when he issues a fatwa. And then the world keeps spinning and nothing changes.
Their objection to it has nothing to do with the use of GPL source code. They object to it because:
> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute.
On the question of the use of source code released under the GPL, they do not have a position yet:
> With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers.
They most likely are rebuilding the engine without GPL code and then doing a bunch of functional tests to see how bad it is. If it's not significantly worse, they will probably just not include GPL code anymore.
That's a fair and valid complaint. The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human.
I think people value their code snipits way way too much. A 10 line function to post to twitter is not worth anything. Its an entire codebase that has value.
> The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human.
It literally applies to a human. Copyright is about reproducing the same work. "Transforming" the work means copyright doesn't apply.
Most of your brain is trained on ideas that come from someone else's proprietary IP, whether you realize it or not. Think about that next time you're unintentionally humming that catchy tune from a Coca Cola commercial.
The copy/transform distinction isn't just about fair use parodies or commentary, but things like writing music or drawing paintings or writing fictional books in a similar style to someone else (and using some of the same ideas).
The crux here is that we can't accept that machine learning is "learning". We think of it as copying, therefore subject to copyright.
It doesn't help that Copilot in edge cases will copy. But in many cases the resulting snippet is substantially a new work.
But AI is inevitable, and therefore we'll have to start treating machines like human agents. It'll be really weird.
> someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code
I don’t agree in general with this. Remember that the BSD family of licenses still require that a copyright notice and the terms of the license be reproduced in distribution of the software and derivatives of the software, both in source and in binary forms.
Just cause I make software that I release under the ISC license, and I want proprietary software to be able to build on my work, does not mean I am ok with someone stripping away the copyright notice and the license terms from my code and claiming it as their own. Quite the opposite.
However, at the same time, if what is being reproduced is only a small snippet or some generic code, as I understand is what Copilot will usually do, I don’t personally mind. But I still think it needs to be tried in courts and that we get some rulings on it.
And I remain skeptical towards Copilot because I think it will be able to reproduce non-trivial portions of code as well, depriving people of credit for a lot of hard work that they put in. At the same time, it is cool tech, and it looks to have the potential to save a lot of time for a lot of its users by automating a lot of menial work in typing out the same old lines of code again and again. So it’s not like I am directly opposed to Copilot either. But I think we need to acknowledge the issues and that Microsoft and GitHub should work to address these kinds of things. And I am happy that the FSF is challenging them on these things, even though they are doing so from the point of view of a family of licenses that is more restrictive than the type of license I personally put on the code that I myself produce.
>With all these questions, many of them with legal implications [..] there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software.
Their unacceptable and unjust opinion is just from the licensing of GitHub CoPilot / Visual Studio Code itself:
>We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned.