This is a VERY interesting case - especially with the current gold rush of analogous AI-generation services. No doubt there will be similar cases to come for visual artists and musicians.

I think the open source community is in the right here. Whether they can actually win in the court of law is to be seen.

Saving money on junior devs, then lose it at the court.

I think for copilot to go on it should have to also produce the license to the code it is biting. Otherwise, I think github will just start loosing projects faster than before. Kind of sad. Github was a nice a way to visualize a repo.

The single fact that it is made by Microsoft should be a massive red flag by itself given that even in dotnet they have a constant fight with the community closing sources that the community had participated on in the OSS part and having to re-open it and back and forth. As a single example of their willingness to break licenses if they think they can get away with it

Great insight and review. Thank you.

I think the whole “copilot is an alternative interface to OSS” is a pretty massive stretch. Even assuming copilot basically does nothing but rip code verbatim, the “interface” it provides is for stealing snippets of OSS. “Stealing snippets from OSS” is not something that is provided by mailing lists, issue trackers, communities, etc.

The warning shot over the bow should have been WSL Secure Boot can always be disabled in the BIOS/UEFI Settings

i think a law suit for it will be pretty hard to prove since it needs to be copying a significant portion of code not just a single function since you cant copy right small pieces of it other wise coding would already be dead since alot of functions are just logical

I am no lawyer, but there must be case history that covers something like this. If Copilot provides answers the same way a person could provide then someone must have sued for using code from a suggestion on Stack Overflow, or similar website.

I was employed by github in 2019. Never received an offer,employment verification, w2s etc. Github is reported to credit agencies but has not paid my salary in 3 years. What do I do

I'm not following the issue 100% here. Copilot's neural network is being trained from opensource material then it is creating big chunks of code that is not opensource? Is that correct?

Exactly! At 5:48 into this excellent video you nailed it. It's very easy to see how problematic it is for Microsoft/GitHub Copilot to handout code without license restrictions that would be there if users had obtained the code directly from GitHub repos. Copilot circumvents licensing.

"I am not a lawyer, I am an Engineer." ~ Engineer Man, 2022 ~

100% agree with the lawsuit. Whether or not it is successful, it will be VERY interesting to see what comes of it. Over the years I have learned to quickly back out of anything Microsoft acquires, as it almost always turns to crap I want nothing to do with. It's very sad that Microsoft gets their grubby hands on so many promising things.

GitHub gives something back to open source. A free service where you can store you code.

Great video. It's surprising to see you without the cap 🧢

Thank God I've been using GitLab this whole time! They have their own issues, but at least they don't pull crap like this! Hopefully, Microshaft will get sued for this!

i think this is a good thing these corporations need to be held accountable for using copyrighted materials.

interesting.

Think you're spot on. Great video.

I really think it's all a moot argument at this point.. Having played around with ChatGPT for a couple days now.. Copilot was just scratching the surface of what's coming! And the legal system is so slow.. By the time there's much progress on this Copilot lawsuit, there's gonna be way better alternatives out there, that could do virtually all the coding for us. It really isn't going to be long before we essentially have the Computer from Star Trek, at everyone's fingertips!

What are the chances of me uploading and copyrighting my code in github and then reusing it with sub accounts without copyright to be picked up by copilot and joining this class lawsuit for some juicy $$$?

voted!

I say sue the bejeezus out of them. Microsoft is a leech, it will destroy github. Hopefully someone will come along and create an equivalent that will adhere to the original vision of github, but I've said that about KZfaq too and that hasn't managed to really happen yet.

lets create another github and port all the code over from the old github.

This was really good thank you for it. Anything Microsoft puts his hands in is ruined. GitHub just like many others are much better off without them. But I guess when you have money you can buy and ruin anything you want.

What a mess!

I think if you accidentally reproduce a data point from a linear regression model youve trainded on open source data does that really count as 'copying'? Your model has just been overfit somewhat and I think that still counts as fair use. Given that the model is vastly compressing the input space you cant reasonably say its just verbatim reproducing training data points. It is doing something more akin to " from-memory" copying like when you reproduce "mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" during an exam.

I deleted my github when i learned about the acquisition. Older gen of engineers remembers too well who Microsoft were and how they got ahead with anti competitive business practices and not tech acumen. Use of training data, acquired without consent from public sources, for research may be acceptable but unethical use. Making a paid product on top is what makes it theft. Open sourcing the model and parameters is what should happen at the minimum.

To be fair, as a dev - any thing can be re-written and there is 0 way to prove that you did, indeed, steal that code. It's no different than when 2 mathematicians, who live on opposite sides of the world, and have no way to communicate, and don't know anything about each other, and don't use the same resources (is this pedantic enough yet) come up with the same theorem around the same time. There was no copying of one or the other. This is just corporate greed and devs pretending that people never use a site like StackOverflow, GitHub, BitBucker, PasteBin, etc to acquire code/answers that they could have randomly typed out if they'd smashed their keyboard for 10 minutes. It's like signing and NDA saying that any code you write belongs to the company. Well... news flash, idiots - anything someone writes as code is forever THEIR intellectual property, as much as you'd like it to be yours. And just because you don't want them to use it doesn't mean they'll never use it again. Especially if it happens to be a very useful bit, or bits, of code. Yes, CoPilot has the problem of allowing you to, indirectly, suddenly have code that someone else probably spent a good part of their day figuring out and writing... but how is this any different from copying code from any other repo or help site? How?

OMG, no baseball cap? Who are you? :) Great video, thank you for sharing!

LOL - Trying to Sue Microsoft. They have more money than lawyers have time. If Microsoft want's to make this happen, they will drown it in court fees and time.

The amount of dismissal and flippancy regarding licensing is appalling. Attribution is an important part of being an experienced programmer. Microsoft has the resources and ability to correctly provide the appropriate licensing information to the user. This would be a plus built into Copilot to help impress new coders with the importance of following proper licensing practices. Rather MS is showing their real disdain for Open Source and its community by blatantly ignoring this aspect of it. I hope they lose this court battle and have to change the application to include licensing from any verbatim snippets or just drop it entirely.

The fact MS owns GIthub in the first place is a huge red flag to me. F*ck I hate MS.

Don't quite agree with damage to open-source claim. No co-pilot: You have a problem, you search for code/repo - adapt, copy-paste -> move on with your project (yes, we have visited a new repo, we know it's there now) Co-pilot: we just got code, mashed from (1-n) repos. If your aim is to contribute to open-source - you will seek community regardless of tools at your disposal. The point that is not mentioned: co-pilot also aids opensource devs. sooo... tit for tit there as I see it, what w/e the saying is.

first

Use GPL people

Microsoft is getting Sauled

Microsoft has always been an active proponent of closed source proprietary software and against FOSS. They have a repeated track history of this. That is why they bought Github in the first place.

I agree what you're saying but I simply won't stop using it: 1. The autocomplete is incredible - for example, say I want to generate a 'light pink' colour - it gives me the answer without opening a browser. 2. I can build backend apps using technologies I barely know (e.g. NodeJS) with little fuss, and a tiny knowledge of the language.

It should be banned. I don't trust microsoft

Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. -- Mark Twain

Copilot is a great tool. I think that he will help open source in the general. Making the development more easy. If you release your code to open source, you agree that anybody can read it. Including AI. One autocomplete tool referencing all the authors for every code that he generates, is impractical.

The lawsuit is a nuisance lawsuit. Fundamentally who was harmed and what are the damages. We see these suits every time there are new disruptive technologies.

The problem is if you don't want your code to be used by anyone else then don't put it on the internet. The licenses are all just made-up crap. They put their code online because it's some popularity contest and then when someone uses it they cry about it. I have no problem with AI uses everyone's code because I actually want it to eventually take programmers' jobs.

I gain time with Github Copilot. I need to understand how someone, with nothing of code for Open Source community, manifests this idea about Copilot. Oh God, now I will lawsuit Redhat to use Kernel Open Source. 🤔 Come on, wake up!!! 🥱