If that’s fine and dandy, Microsoft should also train Copilot on their source code repositories, so we can use that knowledge, too.
I guess you have the right to do this, but it doesn't mesh at all with why I personally contribute (without any expectation of attribution), which is that (much like stack overflow), programmers mostly agreed awhile ago that it's just easier if we all share.
So much of what's wrong with the modern economy comes down to seeking rent on an idea that should just be public knowledge.
Sorry if my viewpoint towards your work is apathetic, but the whole field is already infested with academics who only understand citation as a useful metric. Further, the point remains that anyone with enough money could do this - not just Microsoft (Salesforce has released several models for python competitive with Copilot). Times are changing - maybe don't share code anymore? I imagine in ten-twenty years this whole conversation will seem pretty petty though when your entire program is trivially recreated from its GitHub description without ever needing to have seen it in the first place.
Most "coders" don't publish anything if they don't have to. Using proprietary code is an even worse pain in the ass because you don't have access to it.
The point of the GPL is to force people to share their code.
>which is that (much like stack overflow), programmers mostly agreed awhile ago that it's just easier if we all share.
>So much of what's wrong with the modern economy comes down to seeking rent on an idea that should just be public knowledge.
The entire point of the GPL is to force e.g. hardware vendors to share their driver code under the GPL or any other opensource license to be included in the Linux kernel.
>Times are changing - maybe don't share code anymore?
The entire point of the GPL is to force people to share their code.
> I imagine in ten-twenty years this whole conversation will seem pretty petty though when your entire program is trivially recreated from its GitHub description without ever needing to have seen it in the first place.
What the hell are you talking about? If that is the case then why did humans ever bother with extensively documenting and testing their software if three sentences are enough to encode it? Your perspective is particularly annoying because copilot isn't learning to write its own code, it's entirely reliant on an army of unpaid software engineers publishing code on the internet. If it knows how to recreate a project from just the GitHub description it basically just had the codebase inside its model to begin with and merely pretend that it did everything on its own. That is actually a form of rent seeking.
Was just hyperbole for "from plain English specs/requirements".
I'll admit to being uninformed about GPL, but your understanding of large language models is also limited. They actually learn to interpolate between data points meaning they can compose sequences not found in the training data. Further, GitHub added a feature that checks existing code for a match and rejects predictions if any match occurs.
There are better ways to gain notoriety as a coder than by essentially legally requiring your name is attached to a thing for all time.
I personally would be thrilled to know my work was valuable enough to be used by a company because I really just couldn't care less that about the "credit" part of it. I know what I've done and don't have anything to prove.
If anyone contributes to a GPL software, they're clearly attributed. Moreover, Git makes this attribution irrevocably visible. Before that patches were sent in with mails, and mailing lists were open, so attribution was also visible back then. So, no, GPL makes attribution visible, and irrevocable, by design.
GPL doesn't seek rent over any idea. It forces ideas to stay open, forces you to put your improvements back in the open. You'll be attributed, your code will be in the open all the time, and nobody can grab and run your code and hide into its software to make any kind of unjust profit, which makes "Open Source" coders visibly and literally wince and cringe, because they can't grab and paste a piece of code and make their days easier.
Again, this is by design.
Sorry if my viewpoint towards your view is apathetic, but the whole field is already infested with programmers who only understand being able to copy and paste code left and right to develop software as a useful metric.
It's not about Microsoft, it's just about being honoring a license. A case-tested, lawyer written, trusted license which many developers chose for licensing their work. It's a breach of contract, plain and simple.
As I said elsewhere, some of the code I'm writing is backed by papers. I don't obfuscate my papers to prevent anyone from implementing it, but if I open my reference implementation as GPL, this is because I don't want someone to grab it and run with the code, change it a little, put into a closed source program and call the idea theirs, possibly patenting it in the process.
I have a serious piece of research, my Ph.D. actually, and I'm still developing the code powering the whole idea. I was planning to open it under GPL license, to force its evolution in the open, but I understood that people don't appreciate that. So, probably I won't open the code. Binaries maybe. Highly obfuscated, protected binaries, probably.
