Copilot is the largest disrespect to open source software I have ever seen. It is a derivative work of open source code and it is not released under the same license. It is also capable of laundering open source code. Congratulations for working on the "extinguish" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish for open source.
I really wonder what all those people who said Microsoft acquisition of Github was a good thing for opensource think now. I'm sure there will still be mental gymnastics involved.
He is me. Allowing large companies to ignore licenses and giving them a tool to launder licensed code at scale is a significant threat to the integrity of open source licenses.
I'm worried that this will harm open source, but in a different way: lots of people switching to unfree "no commercial use at all" licenses, special exemptions in licenses, and so on. I'm also worried that it'll harm scientific progress by criminalizing a deeply harmless and commonplace activity such as "learning from open code" when it's AIs that do it. And of course retarding the progress of AI code assistance, a vital component of scaling up programmer productivity.
From an AI safety perspective, I'm also worried it will accelerate the transition to self-learning code, ie. the model both generating and learning from source code, which is a crucial step on the way to general artificial intelligence that we are not ready for.
Horrible framing. AI is not learning from code. The model is a function. The AI is a derivative work of its training material. They built a program based on open source code and failed to open source it.
They also built a program that outputs open source code without tracking the license.
This isn't a human who read something and distilled a general concept. This is a program that spits out a chain of tokens. This is more akin to a human who copied some copywritten material verbatim.
> Copilot is the largest disrespect to open source
No, its owner, Microsoft Coproration is. Remember, what they did with CodePlex archives?
But they ain't some kind of special villains, its today's monopoly market kicked in. Selling startuprs to Yahoo comes with consequences.
> capable of laundering open source code
That's an exaggeration. Copilot is still a dumb machine which accidentally learned to mimic the practice of borrowing intellectual property from human coders.
Industry always saw open source as a cost cutting measure.
I think the real lesson to learn is if you look at the sheer amount of energy (wattage) used to replace humans it's clear that brains are really calorie efficient at doing things like producing the kinds of code that Copilot creates...but it doesn't matter because eliminating labor cost will always be attractive no matter what the up front cost is to do it. They literally can't NOT do it based on the rules of our game.
If it wasn't MS it would be someone else and is...you think IBM isn't doing this? Amazon? GTFOH. So is every other large company that has a pool of labor that is valued as a cost.
Maybe a better question would be how and why major parts of human life are organized in ways that are bad for the bulk of humanity.
