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alrlroipsp | 3 years ago

> So the only reason for providing attribution will be as a product feature that some developers might want to use.

Not at all.

The reason for providing attribution is to create a incitement for anyone to even publish their work as FOSS in the first place.

We even put it explicit in our LICENSE files.

MIT license:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

BSD 4-clause:

> Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

discuss

order

floitsch|3 years ago

That's not true for many people.

When working at Google, developers generally open-source their private projects (which are legally owned by Google) under a Google umbrella, with a Google copyright. This rarely stops developers. When I worked there, my incentive was to make my work more useful and give something back. I'm pretty sure many other Googlers feel the same way.

If Github found another way of making my work more useful to others, all the better. I would prefer if Copilot wasn't the only option, and if there was a good open-source alternative, but that's completely independent of the fact that my code was used to teach a neural network how to complete code snippets.

cercatrova|3 years ago

> The reason for providing attribution is to create a incitement for anyone to even publish their work as FOSS in the first place.

What? You think people only develop open source simply to have attribution? Personally I publish open source because I made something others could use and I don't want them to waste time duplicating effort. I don't even care whether they list me or not, it doesn't factor into my decision to open source at all.

williamcotton|3 years ago

Yeah but those licenses don’t matter if it is fair use or if the sections of code were not covered by copyright in the first place.

I agree that if SSO [0] didn’t exist that it would create poor incentives for open source software but that is not what these tools accomplish. They are the poetic equivalents of rhyming dictionaries. Should I figure out everyone that has rhymed “book” with “look” when I publish a new song?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...