Copilot works so well because it steals open source code and strips credit

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit community of open-source advocates, today announced its withdrawal from the platform.

There are accusations that Microsoft and Openai trained an artificial intelligence system called Copilot on data that was published under an open-sourced license.

It is not like a donations box where you can just take whatever you want and use it as you please.

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It's similar to photography. Even though a photographer doesn't charge you to use their images, you still have to give credit where it's due.

Copilot doesn't do that when it comes to using other people's code snippets.

This harkens to long-standing problems with GitHub, and the central reason why we must together give up on GitHub. We’ve seen with Copilot, with GitHub’s core hosting service, and in nearly every area of endeavor, GitHub’s behavior is substantially worse than that of their peers. We don’t believe Amazon, Atlassian, GitLab, or any other for-profit hoster are perfect actors. However, a relative comparison of GitHub’s behavior to those of its peers shows that GitHub’s behavior is much worse.

There is a repository for open-source code in the world. For programmers and the codes they produce, it is similar to a combination of websites.

There are other choices. Changing from one code-repository to another isn't the same as changing from one social network to another.

Microsoft paid more than seven billion dollars for the software company.

Microsoft used its position as Openai's primary benefactor to build Copilot.

There is only one way to get access to Copilot.

The SFC and other open-source advocates are upset because Microsoft and Openai stripped away the ability for those who use that code to give proper credit.

Microsoft is stripping people's work of credit and selling it to other people.

Kill the copilot. Microsoft and OpenAI could build a time machine, go back in time, and label every data point in Copilot's database so that a second model could be built that applied proper credit to every output.

It is easy to exploit the Wild West do-whatever-you- want regulatory environment and take advantage of people than it is to care about the ethics of the products and services you offer.

Copilot is the top example of artificial intelligence that makes human lives simpler. It takes some of the tedious things that can take developers hours of work to make them easy to use.

There are some precedents here. Human-generated media can be used to generate novel outputs.

The generators and Copilot are different. Asking GPT3 to tell you a story about a happy dog is one thing.

Code snippets line-by-line from files in a database is not code in the style of someone else.

It may be more nuanced than that. Sometimes a coding problem can be solved with more than one method. Code is more art than science.

Just because you can take a picture with your phone doesn't mean you can steal someone else's picture and sell it to other people.

It isn't important at the end of the day. The copilot is a hit. The developers seem to love it. It has gotten more positive press than any of the negative things that have been said.

What it will do to the open source community is irrelevant. It's not necessary for open source repositories to be open when you can work for free for Microsoft.

You don't have a choice. No one can opt in or out. There is nothing you can do to stop Microsoft and OpenAI from using your data. There is no resistance.