zlacker

>>davidg+(OP)
I would imagine the root problem here is people taking copyrighted code, pasting it in their project and disregarding the license. To me this seems common, especially when it comes to toy, test and hobby projects.

I don't see how copilot or similar tools can solve this problem without vetting each project.

>>CapsAd+Jf
That's an entirely plausible explanation, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft has any less of a legal nightmare on their hands.

>>yjftsj+Yg
I'm not really sure what I think about this. How responsible should Microsoft be for someone's badly licensed code on their platform? If they somehow had the ability to ban projects using stolen snippets of code, I don't think I'd dare to host my hobby projects there.

If you can't trust that the code in a project is compatible with the license of the project then the only option I see is that copilot cannot exist.

I love free software and whatnot, but I have a feeling this situation would've been quite different if copilot was made by the free software community and accidentally trained on some non free code..

>>CapsAd+Qi
> I love free software and whatnot, but I have a feeling this situation would've been quite different if copilot was made by the free software community and accidentally trained on some non free code..

Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows source leaks?

> If you can't trust that the code in a project is compatible with the license of the project then the only option I see is that copilot cannot exist.

It might be possible to feed it only manually-vetted inputs, but yes; as it currently is, Copilot appears to be little but a massive copyright-infringement engine.

>>yjftsj+yj
> Precisely. Would it be okay for me to publish some code as GPL because my buddy gave it to me and promised that it was totally legit and I could use it and it definitely wasn't copy-pasted from one of the Windows source leaks?

But where do you draw the line? What if you accidentally came up with the same or similar solution to something in windows? The code might not be from your friend either, it could be from N steps of copy paste, rework, reformating, refactoring, etc.