[captn3m0]

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.

[BulgarianIdiot]

This seems like distinctly the type of fringe complaint only FSF could have, and everyone will ignore.

[krageon]

How is this a fringe complaint? The fact that an autocompletion framework is SaaS is an absolute disgrace. Nobody should be okay with using it.

[BulgarianIdiot]

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.

[pessimizer]

> 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.

None of this is simple.

[BulgarianIdiot]

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.