zlacker

This exact code can be found 1000 times on github and many of those are MIT licensed https://github.com/search?q=%22cs+*cs_transpose+%28%22&type=.... Copilot, or any other developer or person, has no way of knowing where the original implementation came from or it's original license. The cat is out of the bag, get used to it.

>>firean+(OP)
Or just don't use Github.

>>nights+71
Not using Github doesn't stop others from posting your code on Github with incorrect licenses. It becomes a massive game of whack-a-repo

>>firean+(OP)
It will not be GitHub that will get sued. It'll be the developers that use the code without attribution.

The copyright infringement might not matter if code from individual developers is being used - they usually don't sue. But once this happens to say Oracle's copyrighted code... Well, that is going to be interesting.

>>TAForO+S1
Or just don't give a hoot.

Takes practice, but it's a skill that can be mastered like any other.

>>firean+(OP)
I think that logic only works for DeCSS.

>>nights+71
This scenario is specific to neither github nor copilot. It will always happen for any combination of a code generating LLM trained on all publicly available code.

>>foepys+V1
Both can probably be sued - if you copy a copyrighted image from a website that claimed it was free, you are still violating the copyright if you use it as an example.

>>firean+(OP)
There are dozens of companies that ship Linux and other GPL code without providing sources, get used to it!

>>Vetch+82
Correct. All of those “models” are simply violating copyright - the post alone demonstrates that the model itself contains that code, so the entire model is also covered by that license.

I would put money on it also containing gpl3 code, which I suspect means that the model itself is probably also required to be public under the terms of gpl3

>>Camper+32
That’s why we should simply accept that companies don’t have to publish source when they include gpl code, right?

>>nights+71
That doesn't help when someone else mirrors your code to GitHub.

>>Camper+32
This may be an acceptable approach if the code is not produced in a professional context and not of professional quality. One of the keystones of open source is professionals have had an ecosystem where they can deliver value to an open forum but still have at least a semblance of control how their contribution is used via various licenses they can select.

>>firean+(OP)
Yes, they have a way. Even an algorithm given no access to anything but the copilot training data has a way, because it has temporal information: it says where the code appeared first! Github has the data, but doesn't give an easy way to search it, hmmm...

Although we can't rule out a common origin of shared code, including a common origin off github, we can know for sure that old code doesn't copy code from the future.

As to Microsoft and human developers having no clue about a piece of code's origin, thats especially false, since not only do we have timestamps on repositories, we can also easily verify that the code first appeared in the context of the csparse library, by Tim Davis, CS professor at Texas A&M who has worked on sparse matrix numerical methods his entire career.

>>firean+(OP)
Strong disagree with your conclusion.

That something is effectively public domain does not make it legal to use. This movie was in a thousand torrents, yet one gets still sued for uploading a kilobyte of it.

That it is hard or impossible to know if it is legal to use does not mean it is ok to do so. You need a source for the license that is able to compensate you for the damages you incur in case their license was invalid.

I'm not happy about either of these points, but that's how it is currently and just closing your eyes and hoping it will go away won't work.

>>fsloth+07
Sounds a lot like Oracle's justification for owning the Java API ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_.... ) in which de minimis things like variable and structure declarations were used by Oracle to justify a copyright-maximal approach that would have utterly laid waste to open source development.

The code in question is not something that anyone needs to own. Rather, it's what anyone would write, faced with the same problem. It's stupid to make humans do a robot's job in the name of preserving meaningless "IP rights".

>>happym+N6
But that's not guaranteed to happen and it still is a step forward.

>>nights+9G1
Indeed, not using GitHub is a step in the right direction.

What I am referring to is GitHub claiming that you are using their resources so they can break your license, when in fact you are not using their resources so they never made that agreement with you.