The position of the FSF is severely misrepresented by the title. Open the full article, you'll see that all FSF says is GitHub Copilot is proprietary software and SaaS, and all forms of proprietary software and SaaS are unacceptable and unjust. What about the copyright issue of machine learning, then? FSF says it's a new thing with many open questions, they are not really sure, right now they are calling for whitepapers from the public to hear your comments [0].

I think it's a reasonable position to take. Reducing the scope of fair use to strengthen copyleft is a double-edged sword, as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways. It's an issue that requires careful considerations.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...

Morally, I hope the FSF wins.

Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids.

The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!

Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering. It is unethical and unfair to the open source community.

I do not care if it breaks code to bits and recomposes them again regurgitated by <YOUR-LATEST-AI-TECHNIQUE-HERE> in a way that is untraceable: it would not work without learning from our open source code. Code produced by this method should be automatically licensed under the most restrictive license of its input used for learning.

I'm kind of wondering if this controversy might not end up being a storm in a teacup.

From what I've seen copilot really lowers the barrier to writing buggy code. If indeed it does turn out to be a tool that lends itself to machine gunning rather than shooting yourself in the foot it almost doesnt matter who owns what IP.

The relentless attempts at developer commodification will, of course, continue, but I can already sense this one ending up like the developer outsourcing craze of the mid-2000s that the Economist also got a little too excited about.

Copilot is a fancy autocomplete tool for code. I think the controversy comes from it being trained on public repos without adhering to licensing. I used copilot and thought the best part was when it would autocomplete based on other code I was writing. Sometimes the Copilot would help me see places where I had repetitive code which could be turned into a function.

I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code so they train it almost exclusively on other people's code that they don't care for it it gets stolen. Their assumption seems to be "if Bing can find it, it's up for grabs, no matter the license". Good luck getting the same treatment from MS if you upload the leaked XP kernel to github to make your own fork.

I'll accept the ethics of copilot when they add the source code for Windows, Azure and Office to their training set, because only then will MS truly reflect that their model doesn't cross the spirit or even letter of any licensing.

I’ve been using copilot for the past couple to months, and it’s seriously becoming a part of my daily coding workflow.

The majority of suggestions are not quite what I want but then I’ve found the more I comment my code the more personalised the suggestions get and consequently (as a solo founder in my own startup) copilot finishing my code for me during late nights trying to ship features for customers before the following day is something I have become grateful for.

It’s a double edged sword because it’s enabling me to grow my business and remain self employed, but I also understand the concerns and at the end of the day it’s not something I need to do my job (like version control or an IDE for example), but more of a nice to have…

Why do I get a feeling that MS is fine with any turn of events? If some licenses get excluded, then in a way those gain more points in 'pain' according to this https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perce.... But what does MS care?

I think its a fantastic tool to use to work on though. I didn't think so seeing the demo i basically brushed it off. But using it is probably one of the most productive things to happen in the past decade

I have my own GPL software out there, most of the time I think it doesn't get really used out there so its not that much of a concern to me, I imagine its like that for other devs too.

I suppose if you're MongoDB (similar to GPL/used to be) or some big company you care more.

this mostly seems to report about the FSF writing a post, which already had discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998109 (281 points, 203 comments)

Could this become something people can't program without? Like imagine being stuck recycling the same programs and paradigms, not being able to move to something new, because Copilot hasn't seen it before.

So, I'm reading the linked article by RMS about Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) [1] which is one of the reasons why they object against GitHub Copilot.

The key argument why as SaaSS is ethically wrong is because it denies control over a computation that I could do on my own.

> "The clearest example is a translation service, which translates (say) English text into Spanish text. Translating a text for you is computing that is purely yours. You could do it by running a program on your own computer, if only you had the right program. (To be ethical, that program should be free.) The translation service substitutes for that program, so it is Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS. Since it denies you control over your computing, it does you wrong. (emphasis mine)"

I don't find that argument very convincing because it implicitly assumes that there is no alternative translation program that I could run on my own computer.

However, if there is an alternative, then a SaaS offers me choice. I can run a program on my own computer, e.g., if I am concerned about data privacy, or service reliability. The downside is that I have to install and maintain the software on my computer. Or, I could use an external service. The upside is that the barriers of use are minimal.

Of all the articles by RMS I have read so far, I find this one the least convincing.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

I wonder what their opinion will be if they exclude the GPL family of licenses and includes only permissive ones.

Do we owe all our professors and textbook makers compensation when we make money off our brain neural networks that they trained? Everyone also keeps talking about how bad copilot is. It’s the first step! It’s only going to improve and probably fast, given the potential value creation.

copilot looks very cool, but if people end up using it a lot, it probably means their programming language is not expressive enough, after all they were invented in order to be accessible to humans.

What i'd like to see is a copilot for scientific papers. There s so much duplication out there that it would be easy to train and it would save tons of time from the chore of writing and referencing the same things over and over

I think Copilot is a hard problem, maybe it isn't even solvable.

Sometimes it blatantly copies GPL code without my knowledge.

Sometimes I myself write code that could be part of a GPL code-base, without knowing.

Funny thing is, the difference here isn't the actual code that's written, but that Copilot has seen many GPL code bases and I didn't.

Sometimes I really have the feeling Copilot understands my code base and suggests code that seems to be custom tailored to it. Albeit in most of the cases it doesn't fit 100%.

I think the latter cases are when Copilot shines and doesn't violate GPL code at all, but can I be safe? Probably never.

The FSF has made no such statement. This article is complete bullshit and a slanted quote.

The FSF said it was unacceptable because it's proprietary, like Github in general.

They've made no statement about the specific details of Copilot.

To be perfectly honest, I think people will realise it's just not that useful and forget about it pretty quickly

Even at my place of work, there were some expressing interest in it, and after playing for an hour or two, haven't touched it since. I get the impression there are more people discussing it than actually using it.

What seems useful to me is the ability to type in "function that takes the path to an image file and returns a new image file with rounded corners".

These are not groundbreaking problems - I'm generally looking for solution out there that uses a popular library. This is especially useful if it's a language where I'm not up to date on the de-facto library of choise is for various use-cases. In most cases, especially while prototyping I'm not going to write it myself, nor care about which library - I'm far more concerned with some big picture goal.

If someone builds a product that can do the work of Googling a solution for me, that's the draw of the product. The code is freely available anyway.

I’ve been using Copilot for weeks now. It’s definitely useful for building upon what you already wrote. It’s very effective for single lines, but I don’t trust it to come up with entire functions. I tried, but obviously YMMV.

The licensing is definitely a problem, but I think that Copilot only highlighted the issue - it didn’t create it.

The concept of software license looks pretty fragile to me. You can own software but you can’t really own PL statements.

You can own the whole but you can’t really own the atomic parts that make the whole.

If so, closed-source is just a way to make you work really hard to achieve a result that someone else already achieved by means of obfuscation and secrecy. I’m not sure where open-source stands. Maybe it’s just a social contract.

IANAL, but until the question of whether software produced with the aid of Copilot, thus potentially containing LGPL'd, GPL'd or even AGPL'd code fragments (you never know really AIU) is subject to these respective or other copyleft licenses is settled, I think customers are well advised to stay clear of using Copilot. To the best of my knowledge, github won't provide legal shelter if customers are getting sued for xGPL violations; GPL, OTOH, has sufficient case law to make using Copilot very risky.

My biggest problem with copilot is not how it's trained, but with it's targeting of microsoft coding tools. I don't use visual anything, and I don't know anyone who does. I code a lot of python, html and JS, and I use neovim. If I need a smart 'crutch' I'll whip out pycharm.

Mostly I don't feel the need for such things, but it would be fun and interesting to see just how good copilot is.

Not fun enough to install visual whatsit though.

Here's an exceprt from the linked FSF blog article: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...

  Areas of interest
  While any topic related to Copilot's effect on free software may be in scope, the following questions are of particular interest:
    - Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use?
    - How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works?
    - How can developers ensure that any code to which they hold the copyright is protected against violations generated by Copilot?
    - Is there a way for developers using Copilot to comply with free software licenses like the GPL?
    - If Copilot learns from AGPL-covered code, is Copilot infringing the AGPL?
    - If Copilot generates code which does give rise to a violation of a free software licensed work, how can this violation be discovered by the copyright holder on the underlying work?
    - Is a trained artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) model resulting from machine learning a compiled version of the training data, or is it something else, like source code that users can modify by doing further training?
    - Is the Copilot trained AI/ML model copyrighted? If so, who holds that copyright?
    - Should ethical advocacy organizations like the FSF argue for change in copyright law relevant to these questions?

While i do believe that the topic is definitely worthy of discussion, my question would be a bit different.

If the tooling is already pretty capable, wouldn't just ignoring all of the ethical questions lead to having a market advantage? Say, some company doesn't necessarily care about how the tool was trained and the implications of that, but just utilize it to have their developers write software at a 1.25x the speed of competition, knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance. Wouldn't that mean that they'd also be more likely to beat their competition to market? Ergo, wouldn't NOT using Codepilot or tools like Tabnine put most others at a disadvantage?

Personally, i just see that as the logical and unavoidable progression of development tooling, the other issues notwithstanding, very much like IDEs did become commonplace with their refactoring tooling and autocomplete.

I've worked with Visual Studio Code on large Java codebases, as i've also used Eclipse, NetBeans and in the past few years IntelliJ IDEA; with every next tool i found that my productivity increased bunches. Now it's to a point where the IDE suggests not only a variety of fixes for the code itself, but also the tooling, such as installing Maven dependencies, adding new Spring configurations and so on. It would be hard to imagine going back to doing things manually and it feels like in time it'll be very much the same way in regards to the language syntax or looking at documentation for trivial things. After all, i'm paid to solve problems, not sit around and ponder how to initialize some library.

Tangential, but isn't it kind of weird that Copilot is a code generator and not a style-gann kind of code refactorer? That feels like a much easier task because you get to infer the intent of code from an existing example rather than from context alone.

GitHub is now a burning platform for free software - plan according

Exactly.

As a freelancer, every time a client decides for a cheaper alternative, I make very clear I would be delighted to work with them in the future anyway. It rarely fails, one or more years later, the clients calls me back because their cheap alternative turned out to suck and be expensive eventually. Last month, a client from Luxembourg called after 6 years of total silence. They still had me in their listing. 3 years ago, one called me because 2 years prior, the 50k quote they rejected from me turned into a 400K bill from my competitor, and still no release yet.

My rates have been steadily increasing for years thanks to this. Before, geeks were at a disadvantage because people didn't know better, and teams with a good marketing would destroy us. But now, they have been burned so many times. And it pays because more and more devs coming to the market are becoming dependent on their tooling. Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger. The HN bubbles tends to blind us to the reality of the corporate world.

Yesterday I did a deployment, but was not allowed to touch the machine. Instead, they made me call a guy sharing a screen of a Vista machine, while he was sshing prod using cmd.exe, and I had to dictate him the instructions to debug the deployment on their custom linux setup. A near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers, pressing 30 times the up arrow to find a bash command in the history every time. He could click on WinSCP very well though.

This 20 minutes job turned into an afternoon of billing.

Though I suppose that's what I look like as a Python expert to an old timer from the 80s that can code in assembly, debug using strace and understand L1 cache :)

People are scared we are going to get automatized by AI.

I am preparing for the most lucrative decade I ever worked in.

> The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!

Maybe, maybe not though. From the perspective of a non-tech enterprise organisation we’ve moved to more and more standardised software that is “good-enough” to avoid dealing with the delays, going over budget, not quite what we wanted and expensive support of specialised software companies.

Office365 has basically replaced half our software suite, and while we do still by some extensions for them from 3rd party companies, Microsoft is simply getting more and more of our business by simply being good enough at a low enough cost.

I’m not going down on some conspiracy path here by the way. If anything, Microsoft is simply using this project to get free research for their Azure Automation services that are currently taking over all the RPA business from their much more expensive competitors. This needs janitors, but not well paid ones.

Funnily enough I just used Copilot to write a reasonably huge PR (it did like 95% of the work), which was indeed mostly a copy paste job (the whole library is a SIMD library with lots of similarities between the different types and operations) and Copilot made zero mistakes when it didn't suggest something completely different whereas the human copy pasted code that was already in there had tons of mistakes that I noticed as I went through the library. So interestingly when it comes to code that is mostly copy paste, but requires some subtle changes here and there (based on the type and operation, ...), Copilot is much better at it than humans.

> The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates

It's even worse. Copilot encourages boilerplate and poor abstraction by making it cheaper.

>Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work.

There's definitely other scenarios, like my preferred one of Copilot being legal itself but devs being responsible for using code generated from it, same as if they were using a more direct copy-paste or search tool.

I hope so, the pay rate for cleaning up per line of code better match per line of coke. Otherwise my sanity can't recharge.

Morals/Ethics of code ownership aside, I think there's an interesting challenge there in developing a tool like Copilot but without developers falling into the blind "copy-paste" mode.

I think there's utility there, but the execution isn't quite right with me for encouraging the right behaviours.

> Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids.

It always amazes me how many people think in the future every one will know how to code, why? Every one has a car but not every one knows how to build a car, and why would they want to?

I agree 100%. I can't wait to hear the cries of failing businesses because their no-code / low code developers can no longer understand how the system works. And while waiting I'm broadening my knowledge into the field of devops too, so I can understand the whole stack from top to bottom.

That being said, if you are a reasonably skilled coder, Copilot can help you __a lot__. I've started using it a few weeks ago and it typed __a lot__ for me. The sheer amount of time I don't have to spend typing amounts to hours / week once you get up to speed with the tech.

People said the same from GUI webtools, look where are we now. I think co-pilot works for some stages, cases, but for well established software projects we will be required a different extra.

This is like a dentist giving out extra sugary candy.

I like the way you think

Nothing that another ANN can't solve. Humans need not program

This is a stepping stone for replacing developers all together.

Conceptually that is the overall goal.

I fully agree, yet I see this tool as a mere prelude to a world where we, developers, we're gonna be obsolete. At first, the AI will produce some mess and fixing it would be lucrative. In the long run, the AI will create software based on paradigms we human couldn't understand.

I'm in the industry since 20 years and gradually at the spare time I'm learning skills in house renovation. I think in the next 10-15 years I'll loose my job as software developer do to AI and will resort to some manual labor. Hoping I'd survive till retirement

I wholeheartedly agree. It's just obvious that this is harvesting work done by the free software community. It will be very obvious in retrospect, but hard to see now. If you consider that people will code more abstractly from here on, using AI code generation and understanding, automating workflows, the real value is in the way software is _used_, over the original source code. This is what GitHub has stolen (the representation of software as defined by its usage). Like a function can be defined by a formula or by its domain and range, so does software have multiple reprsentations. The representation of how software is used as being just as important as how it was written will become obvious in the future. GitHub should start by serving a model trained on ONLY free software because right now, in order to remain pure and keep separate from SAAS and copilot, we are losing productivity. It's not fair on open source!

How do you draw the line between allowed learning and disallowed learning?

You don't think it's unethical for a human to learn from open source code and then write their own private code, surely?

> Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering.

How's that? The entire point of a cleanroom re-implementation is that the, er, entities (historically, human programmers) writing the code have provably not seen the code being copied. Which is rather contrary to how copilot has seen approximately all the code.

If the code ends up being non-IP infringing on the code used to train it, that would be a big win for open source / free software.

Now you can just grab any leaked code of a closed source program, feed it into your AI and get back code you can license under the GPL and nobody can do anything about it.

An easy application I can think of is ZFS; simply feed the AI all CDDL licensed code, then ask it to reproduce ZFS. Probably will have some bugs but it would be licensable under GPL if the AI is considered a whiteroom.

>From what I've seen copilot really lowers the barrier to writing buggy code

There is no barrier to writing buggy code. Writing buggy code is considered trivial in any language.

I’ve used it/do use it and it helps to fill out obvious stuff - it didn’t make me much quicker.

The part that takes the longest is working out the tests and what the code should do, the actual internals of the implementation are simple, boring, and obvious.

Automate that and it makes developing even more fun that it is today.

> relentless attempts at developer commodification

LOL, it's been happening since the beginning of software. So many things reduce or replace developer work - compilers, libraries, templates, free/open tools. Desire is always going to expand to contain the whole space of what's possible and then overflow.

> I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code

Microsoft can of course create Copilot using the GitHub code. It’s not publishing any derived work on its own - and this type of access to the code is likely a large part of the reason for buying GitHub in the first place.

The only ethical issue for Microsoft here is if Microsoft sells this service (they don’t - yet) and risk including nontrivial code without attribution (seems likely, given the behavior of the preview but if ms for example limits output to a few lines or prevents generating too large chunks verbatim the issue almost disappears).

Ethical/legal issues and risks for users of Copilot are much larger, such as if they use it to conjure up a nontrivial snippet and then not research the origin of it. It’s no better than copying it from the original location.

Microsoft could probably throw in parts of their closed source in copilot - but not even Microsoft controls that. Third parties have copyrights that prevent it too.

But people who keep code in public GitHub repos (I assume) let GitHub do things like train neural nets on it, and Microsoft obviously don’t keep much of the windows or office sources in public GitHub repos.

> "There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree."

At least part of the reason has to be because only a tiny percentage of developers use C++, particularly the flavor of C++ that Visual Studio speaks, as opposed to Javascript, Python, etc. Moreover, kernel and driver code doesn't resemble boilerplate code used in desktop applications. Is this not obvious to the people who keep repeating this?

This is such a limited take on Copilot.

1. they can check to see if the generated code is an exact copy of an example in the training set

2. when the code matches, they can discard it, they got many predictions for each prompt anyway.

3. My preferred option - they can display the URL of the source page together with the code, acting like a regular search engine at this point; this also solves the problem of not knowing the copyright status of the code

I'm curious if they took only the whole of Github after acquiring Github, or if they've taken 'all publically visible code everywhere'. Y'know, as an open source dev who's continued to use Github after Microsoft took it over. I'm curious if I walked right into that one or if it would've made no difference whatsoever.

How is it useful to you?

It feels like the majority of my coding consists of translating extremely complex business requirements that neither the business people nor me understand 100% into highly specific code that appears to do what we want it to do. How can Copilot help me here?

It’s a shame it doesn’t cover any language I use with the technical preview.

Something tells me copilot can be a big win for very verbose languages like C, where most code follows very specific structures.

What are your thoughts on the IP though? Aren't you worried that the code you're writing ends up being a huge legal ticking bomb?

They haven't made their mind yet on the licensing problem:

>With all these questions, many of them with legal implications [..] there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software.

Their unacceptable and unjust opinion is just from the licensing of GitHub CoPilot / Visual Studio Code itself:

>We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned.

You can still violate a permissive license by not including a notice and the license text with your project.

Their objection to it has nothing to do with the use of GPL source code. They object to it because:

> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute.

On the question of the use of source code released under the GPL, they do not have a position yet:

> With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers.

They most likely are rebuilding the engine without GPL code and then doing a bunch of functional tests to see how bad it is. If it's not significantly worse, they will probably just not include GPL code anymore.

The reason they consider it unacceptable and unjust is simply because GitHub Copilot itself is using a proprietary blob.

Looks to me like as long as there is no copyright/legal impact they don't really have an opinion ?

It also makes sense, as someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code.

[Edit: I mixed BSD and MIT, I was going for the more permissive one. The point on reproducing copyright mentions still stands though]

The actionable claims question is the hot question; the rest sort of is answered by that indirectly. It's mainly interesting from the point of view that a positive answer could cause commercial entities to ban the usage of co-pilot (and similar tools) in their organizations to avoid such claims. So, it could potentially be very damaging. Stackoverflow would be a nice example where people learn from each other where no doubt bits of IP from companies and OSS repositories gets mingled as well.

My impression is that these claims would not be actionable for a few simple reasons:

- The generated code is pretty small.

- The generated code is adapted to the context (i.e. not a vebatim copy).

- The generated code would be common to many repositories and not just one.

Because of all of the above, tracing any code fragment to a specific repository and then defending a claim would probably be very hard/impossible. Copyright is about the form of things and if it's not a verbatim copy of something really unique, it's hard to make the case for an infringement.

> knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance

Everyone thinks this until they become the next Linksys, and have to crack open their entire tech stack because someone reverse engineered the text of the GPL in their firmware...