{"id":10896,"date":"2022-10-21T14:42:53","date_gmt":"2022-10-21T18:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10896"},"modified":"2022-10-21T14:42:53","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T18:42:53","slug":"red-meat-friday-copilot-and-copyrights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10896","title":{"rendered":"Red Meat Friday: Copilot and Copyrights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three weeks ago I wrote in Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap<\/a> about Geoffrey Huntley\u2019s post on how VS Code is all part of Microsoft\u2019s plan to destroy open source and pull everyone into software as a service development tools. If you weren\u2019t convinced, here\u2019s some more evidence.<\/p>\n

Vice<\/a> has an article about a group of GitHub users who want to sue Microsoft over the appropriation of their code<\/a>. The complaint centers on Copilot, an AI based plugin for VS Code that offers code completion suggestions. Copilot was trained on \u201ctens of millions of public repositories\u201d including GitHub. The problem is that Copilot can sometimes emit verbatim or essentially verbatim code from those repositories. This use of their code, the plaintiffs allege, violates the software licenses most of which require, among other things, attribution of its source. Copilot, of course, doesn\u2019t do that; it just spits out the code.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to take the position of, \u201cMeh, who cares? The whole point of making the code public and open source is to share it.\u201d The reason you should care is not some obscure technicality in the licenses. The reason is articularly explained by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick who is spearheading the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

You should definitely read his post<\/a> that lays out the real problem but the TL;DR is that it divorces the consumer of the open source code from the community that produced it. By using Copilot there is no need to seek out, find, and interact with the communities that produce the code so those communities will wither and die realizing Microsoft\u2019s long held goal of doing away with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three weeks ago I wrote in Red Meat Friday: VS Code As A Venus Flytrap about Geoffrey Huntley\u2019s post on how VS Code is all part of Microsoft\u2019s plan to destroy open source and pull everyone into software as a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[208],"class_list":["post-10896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-rmf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10897,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10896\/revisions\/10897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}