> There would be more innovation if code couldn't be copyrighted or kept secret. See: all of open source.

I actually agree. However this is not what's happening. Copilot effectvely removes copyright from FLOSS code, but doesn't touch proprietary software. FLOSS loses it's teeth against the corporations.

I'm the author of about a dozen popular AGPL and GPL projects, but please tell me how I don't understand open source.

The purpose of releasing source available but proprietary code is so that users can learn and integrate into it, and making it available lets anyone learn how it works. The only reason I even considered making the source available is balance between 1) needing to eat and 2) valuing open source enough to risk #1.

Please take your condescension elsewhere.

> There would be more innovation if code couldn't be copyrighted or kept secret. See: all of open source

There is a ton of innovative stuff that is not open source. I don't see what open source has to do with innovation.

They claim it is fair use, therefore they can bypass copyright (and therefore license terms).

It being in GitHub has not been brought up as a factor yet (by GitHub/Microsoft), AFAIK they could use code from other places with that logic, they just don't need to.

The point of copyleft licenses (which I assume are what you mean with "opressive") is to subvert copyright in order to incentivize others to share their code by providing them with something to build on if they return the favor. You cannot possibly call these licenses opressive since the default state with copyright is that you are not allowed to do much at all (at least when it comes to copying). In fact copyleft licenses allow you to do much much more than your average corp-lawyer approved proprietary license.

The problem (or A problem) with copilot is that it tries to sidestep those licenses, purpotedly allowing you to build upon the work of others without giving anything back even if the work you are building on has been published on the explicit condition that what you create with it should also be shared in the same way. While the great AI tumbler makes the legal copyright infringement argument complicated by giving you lots of small bits from lots of different sources it really does not change the moral situation: you are explicitly going against the wishes of the people that are enabling you to do what you are doing.

Beyond copyleft, this kind of disregard for other peoples wishes also applies to attribution even with more liberal licenses. Programming is already a field where proper attrubution is woefully lacking - we don't need to make it worse by introducing processes where it becomes much harder if not impossible to tell who contributed to the creation.

Now I am all for maximum code sharing. I'm all for abolishing copyright entirely and letting everyone build what they want without being shackled by so-called intellectual property. But that is not something Microsoft is doing with Copilot. What they have created is a one way funnel from OSS to proprietary software. If Microsoft had initially trained Copilot on their own proprietary sources this would have been seen very differently. But they did not. Because the way Microsoft "loves open source" is not in the way of a mutally beneficial symbiotic relationship but that of an abuser that loves taking advantage of whatever they can with giving as little back as they can get away with.