GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free Software Foundation

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3627319/github-copilot-is-unacceptable-and-unjust-says-free-software-foundation.html

by axsharma • 5 years ago

252 232 5 years ago

infoworld.com

BulgarianIdiot5• 5 years ago

I wonder what their opinion will be if they exclude the GPL family of licenses and includes only permissive ones.

makeitdouble2• 5 years ago

Looks to me like as long as there is no copyright/legal impact they don't really have an opinion ?

It also makes sense, as someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code.

[Edit: I mixed BSD and MIT, I was going for the more permissive one. The point on reproducing copyright mentions still stands though]

codetrotter• 5 years ago

someone putting their code under BSD for instance do so shouldn't be bothered by copilot regurgitating their code

I don’t agree in general with this. Remember that the BSD family of licenses still require that a copyright notice and the terms of the license be reproduced in distribution of the software and derivatives of the software, both in source and in binary forms.

Just cause I make software that I release under the ISC license, and I want proprietary software to be able to build on my work, does not mean I am ok with someone stripping away the copyright notice and the license terms from my code and claiming it as their own. Quite the opposite.

However, at the same time, if what is being reproduced is only a small snippet or some generic code, as I understand is what Copilot will usually do, I don’t personally mind. But I still think it needs to be tried in courts and that we get some rulings on it.

And I remain skeptical towards Copilot because I think it will be able to reproduce non-trivial portions of code as well, depriving people of credit for a lot of hard work that they put in. At the same time, it is cool tech, and it looks to have the potential to save a lot of time for a lot of its users by automating a lot of menial work in typing out the same old lines of code again and again. So it’s not like I am directly opposed to Copilot either. But I think we need to acknowledge the issues and that Microsoft and GitHub should work to address these kinds of things. And I am happy that the FSF is challenging them on these things, even though they are doing so from the point of view of a family of licenses that is more restrictive than the type of license I personally put on the code that I myself produce.

captn3m0• 5 years ago

They haven't made their mind yet on the licensing problem:

With all these questions, many of them with legal implications [..] there aren't many simple answers. To get the answers the community needs, and to identify the best opportunities for defending user freedom in this space, the FSF is announcing a funded call for white papers to address Copilot, copyright, machine learning, and free software.

Their unacceptable and unjust opinion is just from the licensing of GitHub CoPilot / Visual Studio Code itself:

We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute. These are settled questions as far as we are concerned.

BulgarianIdiot5• 5 years ago

This seems like distinctly the type of fringe complaint only FSF could have, and everyone will ignore.

user-the-name• 5 years ago

Their objection to it has nothing to do with the use of GPL source code. They object to it because:

We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute.

On the question of the use of source code released under the GPL, they do not have a position yet:

With all these questions, many of them with legal implications that at first glance may have not been previously tested in a court of law, there aren't many simple answers.

pornel• 5 years ago

You can still violate a permissive license by not including a notice and the license text with your project.

jedberg• 5 years ago

They most likely are rebuilding the engine without GPL code and then doing a bunch of functional tests to see how bad it is. If it's not significantly worse, they will probably just not include GPL code anymore.

account42• 5 years ago

MIT, BSD, zlib and Apache license also all require the copyright notice and license to be retained when copying significant source portions.

varajelle• 5 years ago

The reason they consider it unacceptable and unjust is simply because GitHub Copilot itself is using a proprietary blob.

Gigachad• 5 years ago

That's a fair and valid complaint. The thought that learning from copyrighted content makes new output copyrighted is pretty far fetched and wouldn't apply to a human.

I think people value their code snipits way way too much. A 10 line function to post to twitter is not worth anything. Its an entire codebase that has value.

neximo64• 5 years ago

I think its a fantastic tool to use to work on though. I didn't think so seeing the demo i basically brushed it off. But using it is probably one of the most productive things to happen in the past decade

I have my own GPL software out there, most of the time I think it doesn't get really used out there so its not that much of a concern to me, I imagine its like that for other devs too.

I suppose if you're MongoDB (similar to GPL/used to be) or some big company you care more.

ksec3• 5 years ago

I am wondering if there will be a GPL+ Copilot license.

injidup• 5 years ago

Summary:

FSF claims the world will end. FSF offers 500 dollars for an intern to write a white paper studying the problem.

xaduha• 5 years ago

Why do I get a feeling that MS is fine with any turn of events? If some licenses get excluded, then in a way those gain more points in 'pain' according to this https://writing.kemitchell.com/2017/03/29/OSS-Business-Perce.... But what does MS care?

oaiey• 5 years ago

MS will just retrain the model on a different input. They could not care less and will actually happy that they get an external statement on the license situation and the ethics.

KronisLV2• 5 years ago

Here's an exceprt from the linked FSF blog article: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...

  Areas of interest
  While any topic related to Copilot's effect on free software may be in scope, the following questions are of particular interest:
    - Is Copilot's training on public repositories infringing copyright? Is it fair use?
    - How likely is the output of Copilot to generate actionable claims of violations on GPL-licensed works?
    - How can developers ensure that any code to which they hold the copyright is protected against violations generated by Copilot?
    - Is there a way for developers using Copilot to comply with free software licenses like the GPL?
    - If Copilot learns from AGPL-covered code, is Copilot infringing the AGPL?
    - If Copilot generates code which does give rise to a violation of a free software licensed work, how can this violation be discovered by the copyright holder on the underlying work?
    - Is a trained artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) model resulting from machine learning a compiled version of the training data, or is it something else, like source code that users can modify by doing further training?
    - Is the Copilot trained AI/ML model copyrighted? If so, who holds that copyright?
    - Should ethical advocacy organizations like the FSF argue for change in copyright law relevant to these questions?

While i do believe that the topic is definitely worthy of discussion, my question would be a bit different.

If the tooling is already pretty capable, wouldn't just ignoring all of the ethical questions lead to having a market advantage? Say, some company doesn't necessarily care about how the tool was trained and the implications of that, but just utilize it to have their developers write software at a 1.25x the speed of competition, knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance. Wouldn't that mean that they'd also be more likely to beat their competition to market? Ergo, wouldn't NOT using Codepilot or tools like Tabnine put most others at a disadvantage?

Personally, i just see that as the logical and unavoidable progression of development tooling, the other issues notwithstanding, very much like IDEs did become commonplace with their refactoring tooling and autocomplete.

I've worked with Visual Studio Code on large Java codebases, as i've also used Eclipse, NetBeans and in the past few years IntelliJ IDEA; with every next tool i found that my productivity increased bunches. Now it's to a point where the IDE suggests not only a variety of fixes for the code itself, but also the tooling, such as installing Maven dependencies, adding new Spring configurations and so on. It would be hard to imagine going back to doing things manually and it feels like in time it'll be very much the same way in regards to the language syntax or looking at documentation for trivial things. After all, i'm paid to solve problems, not sit around and ponder how to initialize some library.

swiftcoder2• 5 years ago

knowing that noone will ever examine their SaaS codebase and won't care about license compliance

Everyone thinks this until they become the next Linksys, and have to crack open their entire tech stack because someone reverse engineered the text of the GPL in their firmware...

KronisLV2• 5 years ago

Frankly, i doubt that most software projects out there get that sort of attention. Aside from that, it's also very likely that management and the legal departments of most orgs don't even inspect the licenses of all the libraries that closely.

Not saying that i condone it or anything like that. However, it does feel like these things will oftentimes be ignored because of a lack of a regulatory body that'd inspect all codebases for compliance (even the idea of which doesn't feel feasible).

Because of that, cases where someone has both the skills to decompile a codebase and also has an axe to grind seem like the exception, rather than the norm.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

The actionable claims question is the hot question; the rest sort of is answered by that indirectly. It's mainly interesting from the point of view that a positive answer could cause commercial entities to ban the usage of co-pilot (and similar tools) in their organizations to avoid such claims. So, it could potentially be very damaging. Stackoverflow would be a nice example where people learn from each other where no doubt bits of IP from companies and OSS repositories gets mingled as well.

My impression is that these claims would not be actionable for a few simple reasons:

- The generated code is pretty small.

- The generated code is adapted to the context (i.e. not a vebatim copy).

- The generated code would be common to many repositories and not just one.

Because of all of the above, tracing any code fragment to a specific repository and then defending a claim would probably be very hard/impossible. Copyright is about the form of things and if it's not a verbatim copy of something really unique, it's hard to make the case for an infringement.

pydry4• 5 years ago

I'm kind of wondering if this controversy might not end up being a storm in a teacup.

From what I've seen copilot really lowers the barrier to writing buggy code. If indeed it does turn out to be a tool that lends itself to machine gunning rather than shooting yourself in the foot it almost doesnt matter who owns what IP.

The relentless attempts at developer commodification will, of course, continue, but I can already sense this one ending up like the developer outsourcing craze of the mid-2000s that the Economist also got a little too excited about.

zaarn7• 5 years ago

If the code ends up being non-IP infringing on the code used to train it, that would be a big win for open source / free software.

Now you can just grab any leaked code of a closed source program, feed it into your AI and get back code you can license under the GPL and nobody can do anything about it.

An easy application I can think of is ZFS; simply feed the AI all CDDL licensed code, then ask it to reproduce ZFS. Probably will have some bugs but it would be licensable under GPL if the AI is considered a whiteroom.

worldsayshi3• 5 years ago

If you hire a programmer that has worked on said closed source and ask them to recreate that code in your GPL licensed program - at what point will that be considered infring on the original? Can you relicense code of you feed it through a programmer?

kaba03• 5 years ago

There should be no reason for CDDL to not be includable under GPL license. Canonical does include it for example.

5424583• 5 years ago

I think you’re missing that the law considers intent. If the devs of copilot were not trying to set up infringement, then their algorithm’s output is likely not considered infringement [1]. However, if you set out to “launder” copyrighted material then the law will take that into consideration and likely find that you violated copyright. This intent can be demonstrated in court either via your statements, or your actions (such as constructing a meaninglessly tiny training set).

[1] https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright...

trasz10• 5 years ago

It’s called a transpiler; you don’t need AI for this, but it’s obviously still licensed same as original - because it is the original, only translated.

spywaregorilla6• 5 years ago

On some level yes. This is basically shifting closed repos to a trade secret status.

ed_elliott_asc3• 5 years ago

I’ve used it/do use it and it helps to fill out obvious stuff - it didn’t make me much quicker.

The part that takes the longest is working out the tests and what the code should do, the actual internals of the implementation are simple, boring, and obvious.

Automate that and it makes developing even more fun that it is today.

stepbeek2• 5 years ago

I run through this point with other developers a lot. There are hard technical problems out there but a great deal of difficulty in programming is in reasoning about a domain. If Copilot is good enough that it can solve problems in any domain, is it close enough to AGI that we can call it a day?

pydry4• 5 years ago

I tend to find if it's that obvious you're probably already using a library.

Or, if you're not, you should be.

But, if copilot instead suggests just writing out the contents of the library directly into your code base a lot of people will do just that. That'll be lots of fun when you're trying to track down obscure bugs in huge piles of murky "copilot assisted" code.

It'll be especially bad in environments where developers feel either extrinsic or intrinsic pressure to always write more SLOC and churn out more PRs because it will allow developers to create a very compelling illusion of productivity.

I have a feeling this will be one of the long term side effects of copilot. I'm actually suspicious that this dynamic will blow away all of the productivity gains and then some and might lead to companies banning its use when they realize the true costs of sifting through the GPT spew.

s_dev• 5 years ago

From what I've seen copilot really lowers the barrier to writing buggy code

There is no barrier to writing buggy code. Writing buggy code is considered trivial in any language.

pydry4• 5 years ago

I'd estimate about half of all programming is throwing up barriers to writing buggy code.

There's a constant tension between building fast and right (or should be if you're not fucking up).

bicolao• 5 years ago

Is that true with functional languages? I can see a class of buggy code that can be very hard to write. But maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture.

visarga2• 5 years ago

relentless attempts at developer commodification

LOL, it's been happening since the beginning of software. So many things reduce or replace developer work - compilers, libraries, templates, free/open tools. Desire is always going to expand to contain the whole space of what's possible and then overflow.

detaro• 5 years ago

this mostly seems to report about the FSF writing a post, which already had discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998109 (281 points, 203 comments)

ksec3• 5 years ago

> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust, from our perspective. It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code), and Copilot is Service as a Software Substitute.

So they dont know / not sure of the question of GPL usage in copilot. But they have a problem with SaaS and product that are not open sourced?

rightbyte• 5 years ago

There is no contradiction in that.

ksec3• 5 years ago

I dont know. I guess I am not well versed with FSF. I thought they were to promote Free Software, I didn't know their world view was any non-open source software are "unacceptable and unjust".

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

The entire purpose of the Free Software Foundation is that any product you offer to a user should be owned fully by the user, which means they should be able to take it apart, modify it to suit their specific needs, and put it back together. At minimum, that means they need to be able to see the source code and be able to build it themselves and run it on their own hardware.

So yes, closed-source software as a service is inherently unethical.

You don't have to agree with them, but they've been pretty consistent in this position for nearly 40 years. It's not exactly coming out of left field.

isoprophlex• 5 years ago

Morally, I hope the FSF wins.

Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work. Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids.

The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!

lyptt• 5 years ago

I like the way you think

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

Nothing that another ANN can't solve. Humans need not program

ArnoVW• 5 years ago

I guess it's tongue-in-cheek. But you made me imagine the scenario for a movie : once humans start going down that rabbit hole, code becomes more and more like nature : no over-arching "design" that can be reasoned about, just a sprawling mess of stochastically created spagetti that has been progressively patched.

nix232• 5 years ago

Humans need not program

But how do you tell the machine what your problem is? It's just another abstraction, a bit like manual milling vs CAM.

moksly• 5 years ago

The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates; cleaning up the mess will be highly lucrative!

Maybe, maybe not though. From the perspective of a non-tech enterprise organisation we’ve moved to more and more standardised software that is “good-enough” to avoid dealing with the delays, going over budget, not quite what we wanted and expensive support of specialised software companies.

Office365 has basically replaced half our software suite, and while we do still by some extensions for them from 3rd party companies, Microsoft is simply getting more and more of our business by simply being good enough at a low enough cost.

I’m not going down on some conspiracy path here by the way. If anything, Microsoft is simply using this project to get free research for their Azure Automation services that are currently taking over all the RPA business from their much more expensive competitors. This needs janitors, but not well paid ones.

dangerface2• 5 years ago

Yes this happens all the time the client asks for the world but really just wanted an improvement.

The client has a problem and asks us for a solution. We suggest a simple cost effective solution, client insists on custom software developed to their spec they have "perfected". Client lists all their nice to haves as must haves so they get their moneys worth, not realising I just charge more for more work.

The software is delivered to spec, then the client realises that their spec doesn't work in the real world because they just assumed the best and forgot about edge cases.

Non-tech companies just don't get tech, instead of seeing building software like building a house they view it more like a wizard does magic then a website appears.

maxwoj4• 5 years ago

I fully agree, yet I see this tool as a mere prelude to a world where we, developers, we're gonna be obsolete. At first, the AI will produce some mess and fixing it would be lucrative. In the long run, the AI will create software based on paradigms we human couldn't understand.

I'm in the industry since 20 years and gradually at the spare time I'm learning skills in house renovation. I think in the next 10-15 years I'll loose my job as software developer do to AI and will resort to some manual labor. Hoping I'd survive till retirement

ed_elliott_asc3• 5 years ago

If your reality of not needing software developers comes true, so will the reality of robots will do all the manual labour.

(Still learn to renovate as it is an awesome skill)

xondono2• 5 years ago

I find that very unlikely. I think the result will be similar to what has happened to the electronics industry.

For those who aren’t aware, PCB design used to be an automated task, done by software with minor tweaks. The thing is, complexity had a positive payoff, so soon we had trained technicians doing layout. Right now most PCB layout require so much technical knowledge most people working in layout are engineers with masters degree.

Of course there’s also a lot of cheap electronics where complexity doesn’t payoff and cutting development cost it’s what matters, but it’s not most of the market.

As long as you keep learning and improving, you are likely to see an increase of demand, not a decrease, although the job will be quite different.

kaba03• 5 years ago

No way, to replace software engineers one would have to have GAI, which we are lightyears away from.

The hard part of code writing is not the “transform this logic to code”, but to come up with the logic in the first place, which is pretty much transform this and that requirement into logic first. Which does often need domain specific knowledge, and possibly interaction with the client.

sfabian• 5 years ago

I don't really understand this point of view. The day demand for software developers diminishes, but demand for manual laborers remains, I will start to automate manual labor.

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

+1 Sorry you were downvoted for a reasonable position. I would like to predict that most knowledge work will be automated, including understanding business needs and doing designs, coding, and maintenance. However, I think that we will reach the same conclusion with AGI but in ways we can’t predict right now. Just deep learning won’t get us there on its own but that is a different conversation.

It still amazes me when people doubt or underestimate what can happen in future tech.

bottled_poe2• 5 years ago

I think a lot of people massively overestimate the current state of AI. Unless there is some fundamental breakthrough in computation, I just don’t see how complex knowledge based jobs will be replaced any time soon. Maybe in 50 years. Maybe.

CryZe• 5 years ago

Funnily enough I just used Copilot to write a reasonably huge PR (it did like 95% of the work), which was indeed mostly a copy paste job (the whole library is a SIMD library with lots of similarities between the different types and operations) and Copilot made zero mistakes when it didn't suggest something completely different whereas the human copy pasted code that was already in there had tons of mistakes that I noticed as I went through the library. So interestingly when it comes to code that is mostly copy paste, but requires some subtle changes here and there (based on the type and operation, ...), Copilot is much better at it than humans.

harry8• 5 years ago

That sounds like an ad.

Funnily enough the only thing you can say is that you can copy and paste more successfully with copiolot than someone else who is unnamed and possibly unknown.

The truth of it, whatever that may be will shake out.

kangalioo• 5 years ago

Interesting. Isn't that a good fit for macros though? Particularly for the future maintainers sake. With macros, future maintainers will only need to tweak macro invocations or macro bodies, instead of having to do a huge copy paste job all over again

madeofpalk2• 5 years ago

Morals/Ethics of code ownership aside, I think there's an interesting challenge there in developing a tool like Copilot but without developers falling into the blind "copy-paste" mode.

I think there's utility there, but the execution isn't quite right with me for encouraging the right behaviours.

hippari• 5 years ago

I hope so, the pay rate for cleaning up per line of code better match per line of coke. Otherwise my sanity can't recharge.

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

Otherwise, I hope copilot makes it big. It'll create a new generation of developers that are dependent on these tools to do their work.

There's definitely other scenarios, like my preferred one of Copilot being legal itself but devs being responsible for using code generated from it, same as if they were using a more direct copy-paste or search tool.

wccrawford• 5 years ago

How could they, when they don't know the origin of the code? Copilot would have to provide them with all the licenses of all of the projects that went into producing that particular snippet of code, and I'm pretty sure that's impossible beyond just listing every license every time.

meerita4• 5 years ago

People said the same from GUI webtools, look where are we now. I think co-pilot works for some stages, cases, but for well established software projects we will be required a different extra.

Agentlien• 5 years ago

From someone who has never worked professionally with web development: where are we now?

I tried my hand at Dreamweaver back in the day (approx. 2005) and didn't like what it generated. I've written a few pages manually (first when learning HTML ca 2004, then for a personal website in 2014) and it felt much nicer.

I have made Windows applications with GUIs as part of my job and for that I've mainly used WPF written as a mix of XAML and C#, written by hand and inspected in the editor. There are graphical tools, but I've mostly found it more efficient to write what you mean directly.

But how are things actually done in the web development business, nowadays?

goodpoint• 5 years ago

The resulting mediocre spaghetti will break at record-breaking rates

It's even worse. Copilot encourages boilerplate and poor abstraction by making it cheaper.

BiteCode_dev3• 5 years ago

Exactly.

As a freelancer, every time a client decides for a cheaper alternative, I make very clear I would be delighted to work with them in the future anyway. It rarely fails, one or more years later, the clients calls me back because their cheap alternative turned out to suck and be expensive eventually. Last month, a client from Luxembourg called after 6 years of total silence. They still had me in their listing. 3 years ago, one called me because 2 years prior, the 50k quote they rejected from me turned into a 400K bill from my competitor, and still no release yet.

My rates have been steadily increasing for years thanks to this. Before, geeks were at a disadvantage because people didn't know better, and teams with a good marketing would destroy us. But now, they have been burned so many times. And it pays because more and more devs coming to the market are becoming dependent on their tooling. Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger. The HN bubbles tends to blind us to the reality of the corporate world.

Yesterday I did a deployment, but was not allowed to touch the machine. Instead, they made me call a guy sharing a screen of a Vista machine, while he was sshing prod using cmd.exe, and I had to dictate him the instructions to debug the deployment on their custom linux setup. A near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers, pressing 30 times the up arrow to find a bash command in the history every time. He could click on WinSCP very well though.

This 20 minutes job turned into an afternoon of billing.

Though I suppose that's what I look like as a Python expert to an old timer from the 80s that can code in assembly, debug using strace and understand L1 cache :)

People are scared we are going to get automatized by AI.

I am preparing for the most lucrative decade I ever worked in.

darkwater2• 5 years ago

Near retired sysadmin that couldn't type with 10 fingers.

Hey, I feel called out on this. I type with 2/3 fingers and I'm quite fast even if not like a full fledged 10 fingers typist. At my age I don't think I will ever learn typing with 10 fingers, but I think I don't need it either.

hguant• 5 years ago

Now, more often than not, I work with teams that have been copy/pasting git commands not knowing what they do, that have never, ever looked the source code of their framework or don't know how to use a debugger.

Thank you for reminding me that it's about time for my yearly reread of Pro Git. It's amazing how many people look at you like you're a wizard when you just...read the documentation.

brainless• 5 years ago

This has also become my strategy lately. I got fed up with price wars by tons of cheaper software dev shops. I am Indian and have run them myself, but I am an engineer first - the really curious kind. I can not do price war, I do not like writing casual code just for bucks. So I started keeping just good relations with anyone who is attracted to "low cost development shop". Eventually I started seeing myself helping multiple founders with "low cost teams". I think gradually they will start billing me to guide these low cost teams. (Although that might not be happen since I am also planning to go into the founder mode).

frockington1• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the offshoring craze about a decade ago. Everyone was worried that there would be few software jobs left in America. Now it seems every company is trying to re-onshore development and desperately searching for people and driving up wages

k4c9x• 5 years ago

And it's a never ending cycle. I get older but the CTOs stay the same age. They kick out the old IT, hire some foreign Sales Force squad to rebuild everything. It ends up costing 5 years worth of salary of the old team in just 1 year. Nothing ever gets past the finish line and the existing software just stays in place. CTO moves on with millions in his pocket, owners are left with nothing and end up trying to get the old team back to maintain the existing software. A few years later, another hotshot shows up.

bastardoperator• 5 years ago

It sounds like your customer is dealing with low maturity staff and no amount of consultation is going to fix that even if they decided to pickup co-pilot which is also unlikely if they haven't picked up ctrl-r.

edem2• 5 years ago

I agree 100%. I can't wait to hear the cries of failing businesses because their no-code / low code developers can no longer understand how the system works. And while waiting I'm broadening my knowledge into the field of devops too, so I can understand the whole stack from top to bottom.

That being said, if you are a reasonably skilled coder, Copilot can help you __a lot__. I've started using it a few weeks ago and it typed __a lot__ for me. The sheer amount of time I don't have to spend typing amounts to hours / week once you get up to speed with the tech.

deltasixeight• 5 years ago

This is a stepping stone for replacing developers all together.

Conceptually that is the overall goal.

spywaregorilla6• 5 years ago

This is like a dentist giving out extra sugary candy.

dangerface2• 5 years ago

Also it'll lower the barrier for non-software engineers to participate in writing code. SO copy pasting on steroids.

It always amazes me how many people think in the future every one will know how to code, why? Every one has a car but not every one knows how to build a car, and why would they want to?

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

copilot looks very cool, but if people end up using it a lot, it probably means their programming language is not expressive enough, after all they were invented in order to be accessible to humans.

What i'd like to see is a copilot for scientific papers. There s so much duplication out there that it would be easy to train and it would save tons of time from the chore of writing and referencing the same things over and over

uberswe• 5 years ago

Copilot is a fancy autocomplete tool for code. I think the controversy comes from it being trained on public repos without adhering to licensing. I used copilot and thought the best part was when it would autocomplete based on other code I was writing. Sometimes the Copilot would help me see places where I had repetitive code which could be turned into a function.

ben-gy• 5 years ago

I’ve been using copilot for the past couple to months, and it’s seriously becoming a part of my daily coding workflow.

The majority of suggestions are not quite what I want but then I’ve found the more I comment my code the more personalised the suggestions get and consequently (as a solo founder in my own startup) copilot finishing my code for me during late nights trying to ship features for customers before the following day is something I have become grateful for.

It’s a double edged sword because it’s enabling me to grow my business and remain self employed, but I also understand the concerns and at the end of the day it’s not something I need to do my job (like version control or an IDE for example), but more of a nice to have…

worldsayshi3• 5 years ago

What are your thoughts on the IP though? Aren't you worried that the code you're writing ends up being a huge legal ticking bomb?

nojito• 5 years ago

Only if people are distributing the code.

You’d be surprised at how much code is “borrowed”

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

How is it useful to you?

It feels like the majority of my coding consists of translating extremely complex business requirements that neither the business people nor me understand 100% into highly specific code that appears to do what we want it to do. How can Copilot help me here?

madeofpalk2• 5 years ago

Most people are out there making what are essentially wordpress blogs but in a different language.

dmos622• 5 years ago

Once you've figured out an algorithm, you still need to code it. Thinking != coding. Coding is the easy and cheap part.

jhanschoo• 5 years ago

In my experience, copilot is good at boilerplate and common patterns, but will not help you with the novel stuff (where it will predict the boilerplate and not the interesting transformation that you actually intend)

meowface2• 5 years ago

I can only speak for Tabnine, which is like a single-line mini-Copilot, but I find it just saves me keystrokes. It doesn't help me design things.

For example - code quality aside; just for the sake of demonstration - if I have a line `name = data.get("name")` and then press enter and write "ad", it'll likely suggest `address = data.get("address")`, so I can type "[Enter]ad[Tab]" and save myself a few seconds.

Repeat this for every line in a program, and those seconds add up. I'm a fast typist, but it's still nice to have intelligent autocomplete that can infer my intentions with pretty good accuracy.

I'm guessing Copilot will largely be similar, but with support for multiple lines. It'll probably be especially helpful for imperative, somewhat repetitive languages like Go, where boilerplate is common.

xondono2• 5 years ago

It’s a shame it doesn’t cover any language I use with the technical preview.

Something tells me copilot can be a big win for very verbose languages like C, where most code follows very specific structures.

jfmc6• 5 years ago

Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering. It is unethical and unfair to the open source community.

I do not care if it breaks code to bits and recomposes them again regurgitated by <YOUR-LATEST-AI-TECHNIQUE-HERE> in a way that is untraceable: it would not work without learning from our open source code. Code produced by this method should be automatically licensed under the most restrictive license of its input used for learning.

Dylan168072• 5 years ago

How do you draw the line between allowed learning and disallowed learning?

You don't think it's unethical for a human to learn from open source code and then write their own private code, surely?

jfmc6• 5 years ago

That is NOT the point. You are allowed to learn whatever you want. What is horribly unethical is not recognizing the life-long effort of the people who wrote the original code and designed the original algorithms. Programmers are not machines. The human *knows* the open source that she/he is reading and she/he can acknowledge it in their own code (either public or private).

What is the copyright of code written with copilot? Copilot learns the code and forgets authors.

Would you agree if I take your open source project, learn piece by piece, rewrite it from scratch and put my name on it without a single word about your work?

pessimizer3• 5 years ago

Computers don't have a private life, and applying the word "learning" to what they do is a convenient metaphor.

Computers read, process according to predefined algorithms, and output. A computer "learns" code when it comes over a wire in pieces over a bus, and writes code when it transmits it over a bus to a another device.

mullikine2• 5 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. It's just obvious that this is harvesting work done by the free software community. It will be very obvious in retrospect, but hard to see now. If you consider that people will code more abstractly from here on, using AI code generation and understanding, automating workflows, the real value is in the way software is _used_, over the original source code. This is what GitHub has stolen (the representation of software as defined by its usage). Like a function can be defined by a formula or by its domain and range, so does software have multiple reprsentations. The representation of how software is used as being just as important as how it was written will become obvious in the future. GitHub should start by serving a model trained on ONLY free software because right now, in order to remain pure and keep separate from SAAS and copilot, we are losing productivity. It's not fair on open source!

tbrownaw2• 5 years ago

Copilot is the perfect machine for clean room design and license/copyright laundering.

How's that? The entire point of a cleanroom re-implementation is that the, er, entities (historically, human programmers) writing the code have provably not seen the code being copied. Which is rather contrary to how copilot has seen approximately all the code.

jfmc6• 5 years ago

From my point of view, the 'clean' part of 'cleanroom' means erasing all traceability to the original product. Not seeing the code is a good way to do that. But if you are a machine it is easy unsee whatever you want (e.g., identifiers, copyright forms, authors). Copilot (or any other system that learns from code) have one of these three evolution paths here to move forward: - includes some sort of traceability (not usable for laundering then) - becomes very good at "unseeing" the origin - do not learn from code but rediscovers algorithms (without recognition to humans)

dmos622• 5 years ago

Could this become something people can't program without? Like imagine being stuck recycling the same programs and paradigms, not being able to move to something new, because Copilot hasn't seen it before.

BenjiWiebe3• 5 years ago

I'd guess yes, for some people. Others, though, will refuse to use copilot out of sheer obstinacy if nothing else. They will produce the new paradigms for copilot to then consume.

docflabby• 5 years ago

GitHub is now a burning platform for free software - plan according

_pmf_• 5 years ago

It SourceForged itself.

tannhaeuser• 5 years ago

IANAL, but until the question of whether software produced with the aid of Copilot, thus potentially containing LGPL'd, GPL'd or even AGPL'd code fragments (you never know really AIU) is subject to these respective or other copyleft licenses is settled, I think customers are well advised to stay clear of using Copilot. To the best of my knowledge, github won't provide legal shelter if customers are getting sued for xGPL violations; GPL, OTOH, has sufficient case law to make using Copilot very risky.

k__• 5 years ago

I think Copilot is a hard problem, maybe it isn't even solvable.

Sometimes it blatantly copies GPL code without my knowledge.

Sometimes I myself write code that could be part of a GPL code-base, without knowing.

Funny thing is, the difference here isn't the actual code that's written, but that Copilot has seen many GPL code bases and I didn't.

Sometimes I really have the feeling Copilot understands my code base and suggests code that seems to be custom tailored to it. Albeit in most of the cases it doesn't fit 100%.

I think the latter cases are when Copilot shines and doesn't violate GPL code at all, but can I be safe? Probably never.

jeroenhd3• 5 years ago

I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code so they train it almost exclusively on other people's code that they don't care for it it gets stolen. Their assumption seems to be "if Bing can find it, it's up for grabs, no matter the license". Good luck getting the same treatment from MS if you upload the leaked XP kernel to github to make your own fork.

I'll accept the ethics of copilot when they add the source code for Windows, Azure and Office to their training set, because only then will MS truly reflect that their model doesn't cross the spirit or even letter of any licensing.

Applejinx3• 5 years ago

I'm curious if they took only the whole of Github after acquiring Github, or if they've taken 'all publically visible code everywhere'. Y'know, as an open source dev who's continued to use Github after Microsoft took it over. I'm curious if I walked right into that one or if it would've made no difference whatsoever.

alkonaut3• 5 years ago

I think MS knows damn well that they've forfeited the ethics of their code generation. There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree. They know their model arbitrary copy/pastes other people's code

Microsoft can of course create Copilot using the GitHub code. It’s not publishing any derived work on its own - and this type of access to the code is likely a large part of the reason for buying GitHub in the first place.

The only ethical issue for Microsoft here is if Microsoft sells this service (they don’t - yet) and risk including nontrivial code without attribution (seems likely, given the behavior of the preview but if ms for example limits output to a few lines or prevents generating too large chunks verbatim the issue almost disappears).

Ethical/legal issues and risks for users of Copilot are much larger, such as if they use it to conjure up a nontrivial snippet and then not research the origin of it. It’s no better than copying it from the original location.

Microsoft could probably throw in parts of their closed source in copilot - but not even Microsoft controls that. Third parties have copyrights that prevent it too.

But people who keep code in public GitHub repos (I assume) let GitHub do things like train neural nets on it, and Microsoft obviously don’t keep much of the windows or office sources in public GitHub repos.

jeroenhd3• 5 years ago

I don't think selling the service or giving it away for free makes any difference. They're not creating services out of the goodness of their hearts, and these projects rack up a lot of server costs. Even if their service is free, they're getting a return on their investments somehow.

The fast inverse square root is the most nontrivial code I can think of and it's already been found to appear in suggested snippets, with attribution nowhere to be found.

If we accept Copilot as merely a tool, we'd need to consider any developer using that tool to be immoral. There's no discernable difference between shamelessly copy/pasted code and Copilot output, so why consider the tool more than an automated clipboard?

No, I think the tool is built wrong, setting users up to fail. It's a copyright footgun to produce buggy, vulnerable, often even completely wrong code.

As for the copyrights, all code with a license has the same copyright as any private code hosted on their own servers. You can't just plug some GPL code into your project and sell it, even if you can find the code itself on Google. There is no copyright difference between the projects, it's merely a matter of availability to the scanner.

Adding Microsoft's own, proprietary, quality code to the network would be the gesture of good faith that would make me believe that the developers never intended to break any licenses and that it all just got out of hand.

ThrowawayR2• 5 years ago

"There's a reason they've trained the model on Github repositories instead of, say, the Windows kernel driver tree."

At least part of the reason has to be because only a tiny percentage of developers use C++, particularly the flavor of C++ that Visual Studio speaks, as opposed to Javascript, Python, etc. Moreover, kernel and driver code doesn't resemble boilerplate code used in desktop applications. Is this not obvious to the people who keep repeating this?

jeroenhd3• 5 years ago

No code resembles other kinds of code. A Python data processing script resembles nothing of a Django Web server, but both are considered Python. A dotnet MVC server has completely different architectures, standard types and behaviours than a Windows Forms application.

The C and C++ boilerplate Microsoft uses is very much relevant to any driver development or native applicationd development (if that still exists) for their platform. Their example code, MSDN snippets and documentation is very influential to anyone using C++ for Windows applications. Their COM+ libraries are even more relevant because they all live in user land.

There's also plenty of MS code that's written in other languages for platforms like Azure or UWP.

The there's the C and C++ code that's out there on Github. The C style of the Linux kernel, forked over and over, is completely useless for anyone developing network tools. The GTK or QT C++ files are useless for anyone writing wxWidgets code. The conventions, behaviours and style for the source code of libcurl and Linux are as distant from each other as Windows Explorer is from the NT kernel. Yet both have been taken into account by the mighty Algorithm.

How is my shitty early Android app, still written in Java, with clearly C#-inspired naming and almost PHP-like class structure more relevant to anyone than Microsoft's own code base? At least theirs is functional and useful.

"Nobody programs like Microsoft so the code examples is useless" is not an excuse, because you can apply it to almost every project on Github in some way. The machine learning is supposed to distinguish all of that, that's the entire point.

visarga2• 5 years ago

This is such a limited take on Copilot.

1. they can check to see if the generated code is an exact copy of an example in the training set

2. when the code matches, they can discard it, they got many predictions for each prompt anyway.

3. My preferred option - they can display the URL of the source page together with the code, acting like a regular search engine at this point; this also solves the problem of not knowing the copyright status of the code

Accacin2• 5 years ago

To be perfectly honest, I think people will realise it's just not that useful and forget about it pretty quickly

Even at my place of work, there were some expressing interest in it, and after playing for an hour or two, haven't touched it since. I get the impression there are more people discussing it than actually using it.

mullikine2• 5 years ago

These language models are not being utilised very well by tools such as copilot because they are not mapping very many functions from the editor to language model. The more functions you map, the more you get out of it. If Copilot's workings were completely open and configurable, you would find that people collectively can work together to map many functions to the language model. They are capable of far greater wonders with deep integration and collaboration. I have tried to demonstrate this with emacs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28045894

Accacin2• 5 years ago

Interesting, thank you.

gibbonsrcool• 5 years ago

Do we owe all our professors and textbook makers compensation when we make money off our brain neural networks that they trained? Everyone also keeps talking about how bad copilot is. It’s the first step! It’s only going to improve and probably fast, given the potential value creation.

hesk• 5 years ago

So, I'm reading the linked article by RMS about Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) [1] which is one of the reasons why they object against GitHub Copilot.

The key argument why as SaaSS is ethically wrong is because it denies control over a computation that I could do on my own.

"The clearest example is a translation service, which translates (say) English text into Spanish text. Translating a text for you is computing that is purely yours. You could do it by running a program on your own computer, if only you had the right program. (To be ethical, that program should be free.) The translation service substitutes for that program, so it is Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS. Since it denies you control over your computing, it does you wrong. (emphasis mine)"

I don't find that argument very convincing because it implicitly assumes that there is no alternative translation program that I could run on my own computer.

However, if there is an alternative, then a SaaS offers me choice. I can run a program on my own computer, e.g., if I am concerned about data privacy, or service reliability. The downside is that I have to install and maintain the software on my computer. Or, I could use an external service. The upside is that the barriers of use are minimal.

Of all the articles by RMS I have read so far, I find this one the least convincing.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

catern• 5 years ago

The FSF has made no such statement. This article is complete bullshit and a slanted quote.

The FSF said it was unacceptable because it's proprietary, like Github in general.

They've made no statement about the specific details of Copilot.

bcaa7f3a8bbc2• 5 years ago

The position of the FSF is severely misrepresented by the title. Open the full article, you'll see that all FSF says is GitHub Copilot is proprietary software and SaaS, and all forms of proprietary software and SaaS are unacceptable and unjust. What about the copyright issue of machine learning, then? FSF says it's a new thing with many open questions, they are not really sure, right now they are calling for whitepapers from the public to hear your comments [0].

I think it's a reasonable position to take. Reducing the scope of fair use to strengthen copyleft is a double-edged sword, as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways. It's an issue that requires careful considerations.

[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-funded-call-for-whit...

pessimizer3• 5 years ago

as it simultaneously makes copyright laws more restrictive, such a ruling can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community in various ways.

Could it? Copyright law is FOSS's only protection. That's why it's witty - copyright law against copyright. Weakening copyright law in an ad hoc way is absolutely not good for FOSS. It's fine to rewrite copyright in a way that explicitly allows things like Copilot, as long as FOSS gets to copy bits of proprietary code, too.

Otherwise, after some appeals court judgement that the FOSS community failed to participate in (or even worse, subelements participated in on the wrong side) we're going to end up with a copyright practice that looks like the NFL exception in monopoly law.

bcaa7f3a8bbc2• 5 years ago

It's fine to rewrite copyright in a way that explicitly allows things like Copilot, as long as FOSS gets to copy bits of proprietary code, too.

This is exactly what I was thinking about. If Copilot is fair use, it means that all proprietary source code, as long as they're publicly available to read, will be free to use as training materials for a hypothetical free and open source machine learning project, which I think would be a good thing. An example is a proprietary program released under a restrictive "source available" license, you can read it but not reuse it under any circumstances (and I believe these projects are already included in Copilot's training data). This is why I said fair use can be a good thing and a ruling to reduce the scope of fair use can potentially be used by proprietary software vendors against the FOSS community.

It would be even better if training from all forms of available proprietary binary code can be fair use, too. It may allow the creation of powerful static binary analysis or code generation tools by learning from essentially all free-to-download proprietary software without copyright restrictions. However, the situation of proprietary binary code is more complicated here. Reverse engineering proprietary binary code is explicitly permitted by the US copyright laws, but the "no reverse engineering" clause in EULA overrides it, and this can be a bad thing. It makes FOSS's fair use right meaningless, meanwhile giving proprietary software vendors a free pass to ignore FOSS licenses.

Thus the outcome is unclear, it may go either way, this is why I said such an issue requires careful considerations.

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

I disagree that copyright is FOSS only protection.

But it is true that this proprietary product extracts is value on the basis of open source software exclusively.

Yes, it would be nice to have the source of autopilot in exchange, but I think far more important would be for third parties to have the same access to the code to provide similar tools.

exporectomy• 5 years ago

The FSF said there are legal questions pertaining to Copilot [...]

There have always been lots of untested legal questions about GPL & co. Why hasn't the FSF figured out what it is they do and don't want? Shouldn't knowing what the licenses actually mean and communicating that to people be their number one job? Why else do they exist? To spread feelings and confusion?

vrocmod• 5 years ago

I’ve been using Copilot for weeks now. It’s definitely useful for building upon what you already wrote. It’s very effective for single lines, but I don’t trust it to come up with entire functions. I tried, but obviously YMMV.

The licensing is definitely a problem, but I think that Copilot only highlighted the issue - it didn’t create it.

The concept of software license looks pretty fragile to me. You can own software but you can’t really own PL statements.

You can own the whole but you can’t really own the atomic parts that make the whole.

If so, closed-source is just a way to make you work really hard to achieve a result that someone else already achieved by means of obfuscation and secrecy. I’m not sure where open-source stands. Maybe it’s just a social contract.

hankman86• 5 years ago

I’d imagine that GitHub will end up re-training Copilot, excluding any “copyleft” licensed code. Not because what they do is legally tainted, but to avoid being berated by the FSF and the bad press that ensues.

Once again though, the FSF makes “free software” less relevant and harder to use. Who will want to use such software for anything when being threatened with costly litigation and bad press?

spywaregorilla6• 5 years ago

Tangential, but isn't it kind of weird that Copilot is a code generator and not a style-gann kind of code refactorer? That feels like a much easier task because you get to infer the intent of code from an existing example rather than from context alone.

Applejinx3• 5 years ago

It gives rise to some interesting situations.

I'm an open source audio coder. I'm not any great shakes as a programmer but I make my living by regularly coming up with novel ideas, and my codebase is on Github and MIT licensed. Over the course of hundreds of DSP plugins, some key parts are very repetitive.

This means that there are audio processing algorithms I do which NOBODY ELSE is doing, because they're unusual and in some ways arbitrarily wrong. They're chosen to produce a particular sound rather than the textbook-correct algorithm output. Example: interleaved IIR filters, to make the audio interact differently in the midrange and produce a lower Q factor at the cost of producing some odd artifacts near the Nyquist frequency.

Nobody out there in the normal world or commercial DSP or academia would intend to do that, because there are significant reasons not to (which I work around, in context). But if that stuff appears in Copilot output, they are jacking my INTENT but violating the very lenient MIT license by stripping my credit. They'd also be misleading hapless audio programmers who didn't intend to adopt my techniques, but that's a side issue.

I'm interested in who else out there has a substantial codebase subject to Copilot reprocessing, who is demonstrating intent that isn't 'normal' and doesn't exist in the 'normal' world of whatever domain's being coded for.

The point is, can it be demonstrated that Microsoft is taking SPECIFIC things from specific open source developers that can be clearly traced back to one source of distinct intentions, and then stripping the licensing? I feel like said intentions cannot be 'normal and industry-standard and correct'. It's gotta be things like my IIR interleaving, where it's a quirky choice you wouldn't automatically do, very likely with costs and consequences in its own right. Something you could choose to adopt if you liked the trade-offs (or in my case, the sound).

i386• 5 years ago

Copilot is a cool tech demo but it’s a very bad idea to have low skilled developers wire boilerplate code that they can only edit once.

codingdave• 5 years ago

The reason is that Copilot requires running software that is not free, such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE or Visual Studio Code editor the FSF contends, and constitutes a “service as a software substitute” meaning it’s a way to gain power over other people’s computing.

Hold up a second. So if people have already made the choice to run software that is not free... enhancing their chosen tool set is unjust? (Besides, VS Code is free.)

I'm honestly interested in understanding their perspective, but I'm not following the leap from using an extension in VS code to gaining power over other people's computing.

toastal• 5 years ago

Free as in beer. Their built-in tracking to the editor from Microsoft isn't freedom. There's VS Codium that compiles the MIT project without telemetry, but at that rate, I'd use a different editor.

dangoljames• 5 years ago

My biggest problem with copilot is not how it's trained, but with it's targeting of microsoft coding tools. I don't use visual anything, and I don't know anyone who does. I code a lot of python, html and JS, and I use neovim. If I need a smart 'crutch' I'll whip out pycharm.

Mostly I don't feel the need for such things, but it would be fun and interesting to see just how good copilot is.

Not fun enough to install visual whatsit though.

fareesh• 5 years ago

What seems useful to me is the ability to type in "function that takes the path to an image file and returns a new image file with rounded corners".

These are not groundbreaking problems - I'm generally looking for solution out there that uses a popular library. This is especially useful if it's a language where I'm not up to date on the de-facto library of choise is for various use-cases. In most cases, especially while prototyping I'm not going to write it myself, nor care about which library - I'm far more concerned with some big picture goal.

If someone builds a product that can do the work of Googling a solution for me, that's the draw of the product. The code is freely available anyway.

darepublic• 5 years ago

When tech such as copilot truly comes into its own it should be a productivity silver bullet. I hope at that point I will have access to it. At the point we have senior software engineer coding as a service if I had it just for myself I would hoard and not be quick to share

GitHub Copilot is ‘unacceptable and unjust,’ says Free Software Foundation

Related Stories