> Do you go and check whether a given reply belongs to a licensed project?
All SO questions, answers and comments are CC BY-SA. The terms of the site say that anyone submitting this content agrees that it's licensed that way, and when you visit the site you agree that you are provided with the content under that license. It's not necessary for you to check whether the submitter had the right to offer it under that license; that's their problem. The same goes for any content offered to you under a given license on any platform. I don't understand what your question has to do with the conversation.
The problem with Copilot, and I really can't believe this has to be restated over and over again, is that it takes code from projects with various licenses, and outputs it in your editor in various transformed-or-not-transformed ways (the fact that the transformation is extremely complex doesn't change anything), and gives you no way to know where the code came from, how it was licensed or how it has been transformed. So, despite the fact that if you use it enough you are virtually guaranteed to use code in contravention of its license, you cannot even know which projects you have stolen code from or which licenses' terms you are breaking.
> Also, please consider that there is a toggle that allows you to block Copilot from using public code.
Great. I'm sure its utility doesn't go down at all if you turn that toggle off...
> All SO questions, answers and comments are CC BY-SA. The terms of the site say that anyone submitting this content agrees that it's licensed that way, and when you visit the site you agree that you are provided with the content under that license.
Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? I feel that you are overly focused on the legal part here, which I'm sure was handled by Microsoft's lawyers. I'm more interested in the question of principle.
No matter what the terms of use at SO say, anyone can give you an answer that is a copy of some code they don't own. You may consider that immoral, but I don't, not at the scope SO is used for. In addition, the vast majority of cases at SO and Copilot are not about complex functions being stolen, it's about some dumb code you would have found in 2 minutes of googling. What I'm trying to argue here is that if we are all cool with SO and think it's useful, there is no fundamental difference here. We never cared too much about licenses for boilerplate code, and I think we shouldn't start now.
jhugo|3 years ago
All SO questions, answers and comments are CC BY-SA. The terms of the site say that anyone submitting this content agrees that it's licensed that way, and when you visit the site you agree that you are provided with the content under that license. It's not necessary for you to check whether the submitter had the right to offer it under that license; that's their problem. The same goes for any content offered to you under a given license on any platform. I don't understand what your question has to do with the conversation.
The problem with Copilot, and I really can't believe this has to be restated over and over again, is that it takes code from projects with various licenses, and outputs it in your editor in various transformed-or-not-transformed ways (the fact that the transformation is extremely complex doesn't change anything), and gives you no way to know where the code came from, how it was licensed or how it has been transformed. So, despite the fact that if you use it enough you are virtually guaranteed to use code in contravention of its license, you cannot even know which projects you have stolen code from or which licenses' terms you are breaking.
> Also, please consider that there is a toggle that allows you to block Copilot from using public code.
Great. I'm sure its utility doesn't go down at all if you turn that toggle off...
spupe|3 years ago
Have you ever read GitHub's conditions to know whether they also have the right to use your code that way, no matter how you decide to license it? I feel that you are overly focused on the legal part here, which I'm sure was handled by Microsoft's lawyers. I'm more interested in the question of principle.
No matter what the terms of use at SO say, anyone can give you an answer that is a copy of some code they don't own. You may consider that immoral, but I don't, not at the scope SO is used for. In addition, the vast majority of cases at SO and Copilot are not about complex functions being stolen, it's about some dumb code you would have found in 2 minutes of googling. What I'm trying to argue here is that if we are all cool with SO and think it's useful, there is no fundamental difference here. We never cared too much about licenses for boilerplate code, and I think we shouldn't start now.