[tester756]

I'd rather have some "middle-ground" solution instead of losing such a tool

I don't see anything wrong with "stealing" code that was meant to be public

Banning it brings no value in compare to those tools.

Also, how is that different from Google's scraping whole internet?

[paulryanrogers]

What if the "meant to be public" was decided because there could be strings attached, even if only to require attribution?

[ColonelPhantom]

> Also, how is that different from Google's scraping whole internet?

Many reasons: Google Search provides sources, it links to your website. Copilot only gives the content. Google also doesn't suggest including its search results in your product verbatim.

[tester756]

Thus, if Copilot showed original link to the code, then it'd be fine?

[ColonelPhantom]

Sure; companies would expect their employees to check the license. Remember that a lot of them consider GPL (especially AGPL) software "radioactive", so it will still effectively dissuade them.

However, it is likely that many engineers will skip checking their sources. I guess for this to work Copilot should include the attribution automatically in a comment.

The real problem is that doing this is not possible for Copilot, because the tool itself does not know the source.