zlacker

Just a heads-up that the person who writes this is Tim Davis[0], author of the legendary CHOLMOD solver[1], which hundreds of thousands of people use daily when they solve sparse symmetric linear systems in common numerical environments.

Even if CHOLMOD is easily the best sparse symmetric solver, it is notoriously not used by scipy.linalg.solve, though, because numpy/scipy developers are anti-copyleft fundamentalists and have chosen not to use this excellent code for merely ideological reasons... but this will not last: thanks to the copilot "filtering" described here, we can now recover a version of CHOLMOD unencumbered by the license that the author originaly distributed it under! O brave new world, that has such people in it!

[0] https://people.engr.tamu.edu/davis/welcome.html

[1] https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis

>>enriqu+(OP)
In case anyone interprets this literally: if copilot regurgitates literal code it was trained on that doesn't actually give you an unencumbered version.

>>jefftk+B8
So how long till new software licenses that prohibit any use of code for model training purposes? I'd be willing to bet there's a significant group of people that won't be happy either its literal or not, the fact that it was used in the training might be enough.

>>vasco+Ca
The claim that most people training models make is that what they are doing is sufficiently transformative that it counts as fair use, and doesn't require a license. That means putting something in a software license that prohibits model training wouldn't do anything.

In this case, what the model is doing is clearly (to me as an non-lawyer) not transformative enough to count as fair use, but it's possible that the co-pilot folks will be able to fix this kind of thing with better output filtering.

>>jefftk+Cd
Prohibiting training would not affect the produced source, but it would make the training itself illegal.

>>Feepin+pg
Probably not? Models are trained on restrictively licensed things all the time, such as images that are still in copyright. This is generally believed to be fair use, though I think this has not been tested in court?