1. Someone expressed their concern that fragments of GPL code would end up in projects with non-GPL licenses and called it open source laundering. They were also concerned about the interpretation of derivative work. Could copilot's output be considered a derivative work?
3. Microsoft decided to exclude proprietary code from copilot learning date. If they were concerned that copilot's output might infringe on other companies proprietary code, they should have the same concerns about free and open source licensed code.
> concern that fragments of GPL code would end up in projects with non-GPL licenses
Framing it like this makes it sound like a problem with the GPL in particular, when really it's a problem for anything (including ingested code with no discernable license) that isn't expressly available under permissive licenses--more permissive than even the BSDs or MIT license, which after all, still require attribution by way of reproducing any copyright notices and distributing the text of the license itself.
The only terms where this isn't really a problem is limited to basically WTFPL and public domain code.
Microsoft already launders open source code by just hiring people in China and Romania to rewrite it. Copilot is their engineering culture distilled. However most big companies do this.
Rewriting is totally ok. In every possible context.
Because the opposite (blocking rewriting by some legal mechanism) would mean a past employer could slap a court order stopping a programmer from working ever again in any other company due to IP infringement since he could 'just copy his previous work and hence company ip'.
https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410037309848752128?lang=en
2. Someone posted how copilot reproduced the famous fast inverse square root function verbatim, including comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287