If that’s fine and dandy, Microsoft should also train Copilot on their source code repositories, so we can use that knowledge, too.

The argument has 2 main flaws

1- It's not symmetric. The massive corporations with paid armies of lawyers aren't hugging trees and talking about how "Knowledge is - like - just free, man" with dreamy eyes, I would love if they were like that but no. They are constantly on the lookout for anyone remotely using their work. They don't deserve the language of free knowledge and open data, that would be like extending peace to an invading army, or defending a tyrant with the lingo of free speech. He Who Lives By The Sword Dies By The Sword.

2- If the person(s) behind the data or the code lives off their intellectual labor, you are ripping them off by using it without compensation. Sometimes the compensation is as little as simply citing them, just mention their names so that they get visibility and prestige they deserve for toiling in the intellectual field to produce the ideas and brain patterns you use and benefit from.

The whole thing is a huge mine field, digital reproduction of information and abstract structures is an extremely novel phenomenon that breaks tons of human intutions about how ideas and thinking work and spreads. But the involvement of a corporation allows you to shortcut the entire thing by invoking (1), also known as the fundamental theorem of ethics : Do Unto Others As You Wish They Do Unto You. Do corporations allow you to freely take and mix their intellectual produce and sell it back into them ? No ? then they DON'T get to do that either, except maybe among themselves.

What I find strange is how nobody talks about how inherently repulsive and ugly the "Copilot" philosophy is, how it is fundamentally a dead end and how much it betrays a lack of understanding of how programming works on part of those who fund and market it. Code is different from natural language, the fact that we call the symbols we write algorithms in "Programming Languages" is purely a historical incident. Code doesn't have the redundant resilience and error-correcting properties of natural language, removing or modifiying or adding even a tiny bit to correct code can give you atrociously-slow correct code, or full-of-security-holes correct code, or non-correct code, or any of the 3 mixed together with other disasters. If you're going to steal people's open source code, at least do somthing interesting and intelligent with it, don't be a lazy fuck and apply an NLP technique to a highly formal and rigid domain then smile smugly and charge people for it as if this going to end anywhere useful.