> Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows source leaks?
But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows? The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.
> But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows?
Yes, I agree that it's unclear how to deal with that in the general case at scale. Although cases like OP make me think that we could maybe worry about the grey area after we've dealt with the blatant copies.
> The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.
Well, my personal tendency would be to apply the same standard to Microsoft that they would apply to us. How many steps of removal is needed to copy MS proprietary code and it be okay?
> Yes, I agree that it's unclear how to deal with that in the general case at scale. Although cases like OP make me think that we could maybe worry about the grey area after we've dealt with the blatant copies.
The way I see copilot's output is that it's already in the grey zone. As with other models like this there are no snippets in the model. I can for example generate similar looking code to the cs_transpose function in Lua if I nudge it a bit. To me this seems equivalent of someone remembering exactly how a function works (to some extent..) and being able to write it in whatever language without copy pasting.
So the output as far as I understand is very grey. Maybe there's something in the training part that can be discussed, but as I mentioned earlier I'm not sure what else you can do other than check the license of some code or avoid creating copilot in the first place.
But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows? The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.