The outrage-bait approach in this thread detracts from it. Yes, they trained it on everything. No, it's not clear if that's legal or not (probably is) or if that is much of a problem.
Indeed; the question is if copyright should apply at all. Harping on about licenses, GPL, and whatnot is a detraction from the actual issue at hand.
Also, given that the author of this tweet called me a "bootlicker" last year in response to a somewhat lengthy nuanced post about GitHub, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that they're not all that interested in a meaningful conversation on this in the first place but are rather on a quest to "prove" GitHub is evil.
The possibility of GPL violation does show (one of) enormous ramifications of the question though. I think it's not a detraction as long as the question itself is also mentioned.
I'm talking about how it's presented. It starts with
>oh my gods. they literally have no shame about this.
Then continues with
>it's official, obeying copyright is only for the plebs and proles, rich people and big companies can do whatever they want
and
> GitHub, and by extension
@Microsoft
, knows that copyright is essentially worthless for individuals and small community projects. THAT is why they're all buddy-buddy with free software types; they never intended to respect our rights in the first place
At any rate, it's not even clear to me if me publishing code written with copilot (or even with a random tool that will wget from github) puts the blame on the toolmaker or on me. This post, however, doesn't attempt to look at that but uses language that paints GH/MS as doing something illegal (and evil) that others wouldn't even get away with but not caring about it.
It seems that github did make a legal consideration when choosing to include public projects but exclude private ones, with many big companies having private projects for proprietary code bases. Users of public repositories are less likely to be able to fight github on the issue.
Is that not true? Google and Oracle had a 10 year multi billion dollar legal fight over ~20 lines of code identical between Android and JVM.
A non rich individual has basically zero chance of challenging GitHub on these blatant violations, and they know it.
> At any rate, it's not even clear to me if me publishing code written with copilot (or even with a random tool that will wget from github) puts the blame on the toolmaker or on me.
It really depends on the license, which GitHub apparently doesn't care about at all.
