Microsoft selling open source code of GitHub
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All on Sun Aug 7 16:25:49 2022
Microsoft already bought GitHub and sells open source code for
around $10 a month to automatically complete programmers
code.
Richard Stallman already worries how Microsoft earns money by
selling open source code.
Microsoft uses artificial intelligence to obfuscate the open
source code to get to the money.
It's legal since artificial intelligence is the liason.
Stallman's response?
There are many legal questions about Copilot whose answers I don't
know, and maybe nobody knows. And it's likely some of theo depend
on the country you're in [because of the copyright laws in those
countries.] In the U.S. we won't be able to have reliable answers
until there are court cases about it, and who knows how many
years it'll take for those court cases to arise and be finally
decided. So basically what we have is a gigantic amount of
uncertainty.
Now the next thing is, what about morally? What can I say morally
about Copilot? Well the basic idea seems okay. Why shouldn't a
program be able to give you hints like that?
But there is one pitfall, which is that if you follow those hints,
you might end up putting a substantial block of code copied from
a GPL-covered program, written by someone else, or one hint after
another after another after another ? it adds up to a substantial
amount of code, perhaps, with very little change, perhaps. And
then you've infringed the GPL by releasing that code, unless your
program is covered by the same versions ? plural ? of the GPL, in
which case it would be permitted. But you might not even know
that. Copilot might not tell you ? it doesn't endeavor to inform
you. So you're likely not to know. Which means Copilot is leading
users ? some of its users ? into a pitfall. Well, they should fix
it so it doesn't do that.
But basically, what can you expect from GitHub? GitHub gives
people inadequate advice about what it means to choose a license.
They tell you you can choose GPL version 2 or GPL version 3. I
think they don't tell you that really you could choose GPL
version 2 only, or GPL version 2 or later, or GPL version 3 only,
or GPL version 3 or later ? and those are four different choices.
They give users different permissions over the future. So it's
important to make each program say clearly which choice covers
it. And GitHub doesn't tell you how to do that.
It doesn't tell you that you need to do that. Because the way you
do that is with a licensed notice that is supposed to be in every
source file. It's unreliable to put just one statement in a free
program and say "This program is covered by such-and-such
license." What happens if somebody copies one of the files into
some other program which says it's covered by a different
license? Now that program has been inaccurately mis-licensed,
which is illegal and is going to mislead users. So any
self-respecting ? any repository that wants to be honest has to
explain these things, not just tell people to make the licensing
of each piece of code clear, but help users do so ? make it
easy.
So GitHub has had this enormous problem for all of its existence,
and Copilot has the similar ? a basically, vaguely similar sort
of problem, in the same area. It's not exactly the same problem.
I don't think that copying a snippet of a few lines of code
infringes any license. I think it's de minimus. But I'm not a
lawyer.
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