[tevon]

Yes! Exactly.

The article suggests that he wants to know "who wrote the code" if a senior dev he trusts submits a PR. He doesn't want to be surprised that "the AI" wrote some of this code.

But its ALL written by the senior dev. If he trusts that dev, that means that dev has thoroughly read and tested his code! That's the important bit. Remembering proper syntax/imports/nesting levels is the tiniest piece of writing good code. And copilot can take that off our hands.

[falcolas]

That's like saying that code copy/pasted from OSS projects on github was "written by the developer". Which is not true.

The speed of your developer and the correctness and test coverage of your code doesn't matter when it comes to license compliance.

And license compliance could cost your company 100x (if not more) the value of your best software developer - especially for the non-OSS licenses.

[khalilravanna]

> That's like saying that code copy/pasted from OSS projects on github was "written by the developer".

I don't think that's what OP is saying. What I think OP is saying (and I agree) is that submitted code is trusted if you trust the source. If you take the person putting code in front of you and ask "Would this person copy someone else's code and submit it as their own" and the answer is "No they would not copy code" then every step that trusted-person took to get to that code is immaterial. Whether they used StackOverflow or Copilot or whatever AI assisted code generating tools do or don't get developed in the future. At the end of the day a good, trustworthy engineer isn't going to use licensed software by "accident"[1].

1. I put "accident" in quotes because it seems so crazy to me that someone would start writing a method "doThing" and then CoPilot spits out a licensed implementation of "doThing" and the engineer would look at it and go "This seems fine."

[falcolas]

> every step that trusted-person took to get to that code is immaterial.

Which is, unfortunately, completely useless when it comes to copyright infringement. Trust in the individual will not change the output of an audit for copyrighted code, or the results from said audit.

The only thing that a "trusted" individual can contribute in a copyright infringement investigation is attesting that they did not know that the code they put in the codebase was copyrighted. And all that does is save the company from getting the higher "willful infringement" fines, if it should get that far.

Wilful Infringement Damages: https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/708

[iceburgcrm]

It was written by the developer. If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it. Whether I have the copyright to make money off of it or whether it is trademarked are different things.

You could state they are not the first to write this which would be more correct.

[falcolas]

GitHub Copilot has been concretely demonstrated to emit significant chunks of OSS licensed code.

Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it.

EDIT:

> If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it.

Not from a copyright point of view. The rights to those lyrics belong to the songwriter. It's kinda like photographs. You don't automatically have the right to distribute a photograph of yourself that was taken by someone else.

[warkdarrior]

> Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it.

That "significant enough [...] to taint the entire codebase" remains to be decided in court.

[falcolas]

> That "significant enough [...] to taint the entire codebase" remains to be decided in court.

I doubt any employer would appreciate being this particular guinea pig because one of their employees wanted to avoid writing some boilerplate.

[ekidd]

Several of the byte-for-byte copies pointed out by open source authors were longer than 20 lines, and contained verbatim comments.

I am not a lawyer, but that's been enough to get people in legal trouble in the US.