GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion
I feel &quot;stealing your community&quot; is lawyer hyperbole, but people also seem ok with what MS is doing with copilot, and I am not.<p>If you think what copilot is doing is ok, and there is nothing wrong with it, I&#x27;d love it if you could go through this small thought exercise, and see if it impacts your view at all:<p>Say you write a bunch of code, and release it under GPL. For the sake of argument imagine it is something complicated that you care about.<p>Now say another person is trying to do what your code does, and they find your code, a say &quot;excellent&quot;. They then copy and paste it into their project, and release their code under a BSD license instead.<p>Would you consider this theft of your IP? The law certainly would, and I think most devs would as well.<p>What would you say if they instead release &quot;their&quot; code as public domain?<p>Now we&#x27;ll go a bit further. Another person is trying to solve this problem in some commercial software. They find your code, copy-paste it into their project, then sell their software and don&#x27;t release the source, or even acknowledge you.<p>Would you consider _this_ theft? again the law would.<p>Now, what if instead they found your code through the invalid BSD relicense? or the invalid public domain one?<p>To me every one of these would be theft, and every one would be required to required to release the source of projects that made use of my GPL&#x27;d code, under the GPL. That is literally the whole point of the GPL.<p>But let&#x27;s imagine a different route.<p>A person is writing some code and can&#x27;t work out how to solve a problem, so they ask on StackOverflow. Now another person comes along and answer the question by copy-pasting from your project into SO. The first person says &quot;yay!&quot; and then copies that code, and we repeat the above scenarios.<p>In an even more extreme case, imagine both of the above people work at the same large company - so neither knows or is even aware of the other - how does this impact what is going on? It&#x27;s two people, but fundamentally the company is copying the original GPL code into SO, then copying it from SO into its proprietary code.<p>I get that MS and GitHub try to position it as if copilot is &quot;creating code&quot;, but it is simply doing a statistical code completion that is demonstrably happy to copy and paste from the original source into the recipient code. To my mind all it is doing is providing a mechanism to launder GPL (or whatever) code into your own without the license, by slapping &quot;ML&quot; and &quot;AI&quot; on the process and requiring more than 3 keys to be involved.