Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?
My level of engagement with this: I was accepted into the technical preview of CoPilot, and while I did generate a few functions and messed around a bit, I don&#x27;t do enough actual programming these days (because reasons) to have made good use of it. I won&#x27;t be using it as a commercial product, I&#x27;m pretty sure, and I seem to have until August to use it for free, if I&#x27;m gonna. Anyways...<p>Remember Bill Gates&#x27; open letter to hobbyists in 1976, in which he blamed pirates for ruining everything? This discussion is much more interesting and subtle than the old debate about piracy&#x27;s place (and it definitely has a place) in user communities, but I find it humorous that Gates&#x27;s behemoth, all these years later, seems to have circled around to doing the same thing.<p>As one who started out by going to swap meets with my Commie 64 and completely disregarding the hand-wringing, moustache-twirling frets of the people RMS (and I) would later refer to as Hoarders, I am pretty sure that I land in the Don&#x27;t Care category of this debate. Specifically, I think the most compelling point made in the article is when it points out that the tools which were used to create CoPilot are available for free to all, so anyone who is willing to put in the effort of learning how to train models is free to recreate CoPilot for themselves, and share it with anyone.<p>We all have copypasted code from github or SO at some point without thinking about the license, I am pretty sure, in many cases while at work or otherwise engaged in commercial software activities. CoPilot cannot write entire programs (yet), all it can really do at this point is automate the searching and CTRL-C+V part for snippets and functions, and that is a net good for anyone who writes software.<p>If there is going to be a lawsuit, I would hope that it hinges strictly on whether github has the right to charge money for it, because essentially, what they are doing by increasing the speed at which people can work is lowering the number of coders required to finish a project on a given timeline. This is both a boon to anyone who is working on something they intend to release FOSS, and simultaneously a device by which greedy Hoarders who want to pay as few people as possible while profiting from the work of those they do pay can increase their profits immensely while creating fewer good jobs for humans.<p>To put it more simply, when Hoarders use this tech, it is a transfer of wealth out of the pockets of working programmers, into the pockets of shareholders in whatever corporation is reselling this technology. There is good reason, in other words, for working programmers to dislike this, and for FOSS volunteers to like it.<p>The lawsuit I would like to see happen, if they must, is one which simply seeks to prevent anyone from charging for this, as that would at least keep the investor class from further draining the economy of people who actually work.<p>Given that the tools for training models are freely available, what I would prefer is if someone with the time implements some form of free version of the same thing. The data they trained the model on for Copilot is freely available to anyone with an internet connection, as are the ML tools. It&#x27;s extremely clear to everyone that the code copypasta&#x27;d by the model does not belong to Microsoft&#x2F;Github, so if they can sell it, nobody can argue that a free program can&#x27;t automatically search and copy it for you for free.<p>There are some that this solution, which I am pretty sure will come about, would not satisfy, and those are the people who can rightly be said to be against innovation and new technologies. It hinges on whether money is changing hands, and whose hands the money is passing into.<p>Back in those Commie 64 days, we all pirated freely with zero consequence, with one exception that I can recall: one dude in my city started selling pirated software at $5 per floppy. As it happens, he was a friend of my uncle&#x27;s and I knew him personally. He was a poor man with very little going for him in life, suffice to say, but nonetheless, it only took a couple of months until the police were at his door, and they seized his 64 and all his software.<p>I disagreed with his actions but I never hated the guy, he was too sad and pathetic to hate if you saw the life he actually lived, but many, many people did, including all the local pirates, because we were firmly of the mindset that software was meant to be shared freely. We may have been wrong about that, but everyone, pirates and non-pirates alike, agreed that the dude taking money was 100% wrong.<p>I think the same dynamic is taking place here. You will never convince me that copying code from github or SO is wrong, but I agree that CoPilot should not be a commercial thing.