My employer (IMHO smartly) forbids use of LLMs in company IP and company laptops, etc. Many others I'm sure are doing the same, and many others will follow.
Today's MS isn't really the same, and they've clearly made their peace with Linux. But it still happens that the GPL is in some fundamental ways at odds with commercial exploitation of open source code. So any corporate entity is going to struggle with it because at best it requires being very careful in distribution, or trying to negotiate or cut a deal with the licensee. At worst it can lead to legal problems and IP leakage on your own product.
So, not claiming any conspiracy. Or intent to violate intentionally. But it is in the convenient interests of companies like MS/OpenAI/GitHub to treat open source work as effectively public domain rather than under copyright, and to push the limits there.
The risk to an employer is of course the accidental introduction of such copylefted material into their code-base through copilot or similar tools.
I suspect two sources of disconnect with the broader community on hackernews that doesn't seem to see the issue here:
a) Much of the folks on this forum are working in the full-stack/web space where fundamentally novel, patented, or conceptually difficult algorithms and datastructures are rare. For them Copilot is an absolute blessing in helping to reduce the tedium of boilerplate. However in the embedded systems, operating systems, compiler, game engine dev, database internals etc. world there are other aspects at work. In certain contexts, Copilot has been shown to reproduce complicated or difficult code taken from copyrighted or copylefted (or maybe even patented sources) without attribution. And apparently now with some explicit obfuscation.
To put it another way: it's unlikely that Copilot's going to violate licenses with its assistance with turning your value/model objects from one structure to another, or writing a call into a SQL ORM. But it's quite possible that if I'm writing a DB join algorithm or some complicated math in a rendering engine or a compiler optimization phase that it could "crimp notes" from a source under restrictive license... because those things are absolutely in its learning set and the LLM doesn't "know" about the licensing behind them.
b) Either misunderstanding of, or lack of knowledge of, or outright hostility to... copylefted or attribution licenses which require special handling.