What Copilot means for open source
IMO, all these concerns about licensing ignore a pretty important fact: Copilot is (in most cases) no different from a human.<p>If I read the code for, I don&#x27;t know, some GPL-3 library and then write my own MIT-licensed version--that&#x27;s totally fine.<p>A programmer can read strictly licensed code and then use that knowledge to write their own non-strictly licensed code.<p>Copilot is not different from a human. It has knowledge &amp; it uses it. It isn&#x27;t copy-and-pasting (there are 1&#x2F;2 edge cases where it is; but for the most part it&#x27;s new ideas).<p>It&#x27;s the same thing as saying &quot;Dall-E 2 is plagiarizing art&quot;.<p>When I write a quicksort algorithm, I don&#x27;t give any attribute to the code I saw for the algorithm in some random library.<p>Fundamentally, there&#x27;s no real difference between Copilot and a human.
I&#x27;ve watched Copilot write crazy lodash one-liners that were clearly contextual to <i>my</i> code.<p>I think what is fundamentally happening here is that older people &#x2F; people of the last generation are realizing that just as sys admin jobs &#x2F; etc. are going away, soon many rote coding jobs will be taken away since Copilot will automate them. And that&#x27;s fine, but it is producing backlash which comes in the form of licensing issues.<p>Basically, there&#x27;s no difference between Copilot and Dall-E and it&#x27;s pretty clear that Dall-E has no licensing issues, thus Copilot should also be in the clear.