[HN Gopher] FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and lega...
___________________________________________________________________
FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions
around Copilot
Author : non_sequitur
Score : 200 points
Date : 2021-07-29 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fsf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fsf.org)
| belorn wrote:
| An interesting initiative from FSF, through I suspect the answer
| the most of the question will be answered when someone attempts a
| similar projects in a more traditional copyright-restrictive
| area.
|
| As an example I would like to see is a Cosinger, where the AI is
| trained using songs on youtube and streaming services. With the
| final product, a user start to sing and the algorithm attempt to
| sing along and give the singer suggestions for how the song
| should continue. I could see how a lot of musicians would be
| willing to pay good money for such program, and removing
| obligations to pay any money for the training set would make it
| much more feasible to create.
|
| There are already AI's that create music (through unlikely from
| proprietary training sets). A Cosinger shouldn't be too far from
| that.
| antocv wrote:
| A Cosinger would be illegal unethical, profit killing, anti
| democracy and ultimately anti our very own freedom to own
| intellectual property. /s
|
| The same difference as allowing Google to prosper while beating
| down ThePirateBay, another search engine.
| belorn wrote:
| I predict it is very likely we will see a court case where a
| smaller actor will take public available information as
| training data and get sued for copyright information. It will
| be interesting to see if, just like in the pirate bay case,
| the courts will be creative. In the TPB case, the accused was
| found guilty of an Swedish anti-biker gang law that was
| written with the intention to shut down biker bars.
|
| When copilot came out, one thing it reminded me of was the
| ethical considerations of face generators in animation. The
| output naturally has some similarities with the training
| data, and it is trivial to use a limited set of actors in
| order to create faces with canny similarities of the actors.
| A question that people asked (here on HN if I recall) was if
| you needed permission from those actors to use in the
| training set, or if this would allow anyone to "steal" the
| face of public faces and create semi-look alike that can then
| be used in anything from porn to advertisement.
|
| The law is undoubtedly going to catch up.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Given how the racist twitterbot AI turned out, along with L4
| autonomous driving by 2017, I suspect that Copilot is going to
| suffer most from an incredibly high velocity of churned out
| security bugs and bad code. SWEs are probably going to get fired
| for using it and companies will need to ban it, even if the legal
| problems don't take it down.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| It's useless. It is a problem looking for a solution much like
| most "AI" tools these days. I am frankly frustrated at everyone
| buying into this stunt.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| I don't think Copilot is useless at all. Today it's actually
| been very helpful for me with interactive, notebooks-based
| programming. And it's also just an early beta right now; as
| the model improves and the tooling around it matures a little
| more, I suspect I'll be using it a lot for interactive stuff.
|
| Notebooks programming has a flow of "execute a small bit of
| code, check the results, and iterate", and this fits
| perfectly with Copilot since you still need to check if the
| suggestions work.
|
| Maybe this kind of programming is where Copilot finds a
| niche, maybe not. I don't know. I'm skeptical of its use in
| larger applications where you can't trivially check if the
| code you wrote (with its help) did what you want. I think
| there needs to be a lot more tooling built around that to
| really make it compelling for larger applications like that,
| likely in the form of more editor tooling integrations. But I
| think it's promising. I wrote about that a little more here:
| https://phillipcarter.dev/posts/four-dev-tools-areas-
| future/...
| ralph84 wrote:
| Their link to why you shouldn't use GitHub[0] takes you to a page
| where they criticize GitHub for complying with US export
| controls. The FSF is a US corporation, why do they think that US
| export controls don't equally apply to savannah.gnu.org? And
| unlike FSF, GitHub has actually done the work of applying for
| export licenses so that developers in US-sanctioned countries can
| access GitHub[1].
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-
| evaluation.html#G... [1]
| https://github.blog/2021-01-05-advancing-developer-freedom-g...
| fadjacent wrote:
| github could easily establish a non-us entity to host export
| restricted code. And for savannah, if anyone had any code they
| were worried about export control for their code, savannah
| would quickly and easily have an independent person host that
| repo outside the US.
| thomzane wrote:
| I am excited to see where these questions lead.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Something like this? [GitHub Copilot License
| Config Menu] Show suggestions with the following tags:
| - [ ] GPLv3 - [x] GPLv2 - [ ] AGPL - [x] CC-
| BY-SA - [x] Apache License - [x] MIT License
| - [ ] No License Attribution
| dunham wrote:
| Would that require generating 2^n models or can models be
| combined?
| blooalien wrote:
| I would think that to combine the models, the software
| would need some internal method to differentiate between
| the licenses used by the various code sources it's pulling
| it's suggestion "ideas" from, and the compatibility between
| the licenses of those sources and your own choice of
| licensing for the project you're creating.
| remram wrote:
| Those licenses require attributions. You can't just say
| "Copyright (c) all the projects indexed in Copilot".
| grepfru_it wrote:
| There's certain information I cannot share, but you can see
| the general idea of what I'm throwing out here
| tyingq wrote:
| Other picklists might be handy too, especially something that
| would narrow to higher quality sources.
|
| And they need a report button with a picklist of reasons.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| eg, cleanliness described by different linters/static-
| analysis tools? Can we actually make _better_ code
| suggestions by choosing examples which are known to have
| less super-obvious flaws?
| tyingq wrote:
| Linters would be nice, though the bar is pretty low. A
| lot of the examples won't even compile :)
| lights0123 wrote:
| > It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual
| Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code)
|
| A little nitpicky, but the only proprietary part it requires is
| the plugin itself, not the IDE--Copilot runs just fine with the
| Free build of VS Code compiled from source from GitHub, after
| flipping a switch to enable WIP APIs.
| r283492 wrote:
| I think you are wrong: https://vscodium.com/
| lights0123 wrote:
| VSCodium provides Free pre-compiled binaries of VS Code from
| GitHub, like I was describing. What about it makes me wrong?
|
| I did it two days ago, installing the Copilot plugin in a
| Free build of VS Code provided by my distro.
| davisr wrote:
| The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an
| aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If
| megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for
| violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into
| oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no
| skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to
| every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation because it's
| unfair and illegal what they're doing.
|
| This isn't ML, it is a ripoff and is violating clear software
| licensing terms. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
|
| Software freedom matters, but I wouldn't expect the typical HN
| type to understand, since their money is made on exploiting
| freely-available software, putting it into proprietary little
| SaaS boxes, then re-selling it.
| syshum wrote:
| Thank you...
| echelon wrote:
| > The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an
| aneurysm.
|
| For the past ten years we've been spoon fed that it's okay for
| Open Source / Free Software to be co-opted by giants and
| subsequently kept private.
|
| You'll be harassed for telling people it's wrong for Apple to
| lock down the iPhone. Or that Google shouldn't be in charge of
| web standards.
|
| Web infrastructure is mostly a bunch of black boxes. How far
| we've fallen! We need a new cloud provider that is 100% on an
| open stack. Billing system and all.
|
| Richard Stallman is no longer a hero. Yes, he did wrong and
| gross things, but in the same breath he's brushed under the
| rug, so are his ideas.
|
| We've all been collectively gaslighted. Wake up.
|
| Downvoters: Tell me how I'm wrong.
| syshum wrote:
| I learned web development looking at websites code, and open
| source libraries
|
| Now with JS Obfuscation, and Web Assembly they are attempting
| to make websites like complied software
| api wrote:
| Most of the people who go nuts when you point these things
| out are FOSS zealots reacting to the idea that FOSS licenses
| should be adjusted to prevent billion dollar companies from
| co-opting it for profit.
| echelon wrote:
| Profit is fine. Building anti-competitive monopolies that
| don't share and that seek to own more and more of computing
| was an unanticipated side effect.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what a lot of open source licenses
| have permitted due to hiding things behind SaaS layers
| rather than distributing products?
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think there's a single "anti-competitive
| monopoly" today that has less FOSS involvement than any
| major software company in the 20th century.
| filoleg wrote:
| > Yes, he did wrong and gross things, but in the same breath
| he's brushed under the rug, so are his ideas.
|
| His ideas being "brushed under the rug" had nothing to do
| with his public "cancellation" that happened in the past few
| years.
|
| Stallman has always been an extreme purist that prioritized
| his ideological stance over anything else that matters to
| users. And his ideas were "brushed under the rug" just as
| much 5 years ago (before public revelations about his
| misdoings) as they are now. It might just feel like he has
| been increasingly "brushed under the rug" more recently
| because he has been becoming increasingly irrelevant and more
| of just a spokesperson.
| syshum wrote:
| Stallman was looking out for USERS, not developers. the
| problem was the developers thought it was them that
| Stallman was wanting to protect.
|
| GPL, and Libre Software is about keeping software open from
| the Dev to the EndUser. Non-Copyleft "Open Source" is about
| keeping libraries open for Dev's to exploit into their
| closed source products...
|
| There is a big difference, I support Free Software, not
| "Open Source"
| kube-system wrote:
| RMS is not the dictator of FOSS. There are plenty of valid
| competing opinions of what "freedom" means and not all of
| those include legally compelling everyone to share. The MIT
| license, for example, is both older and more popular than
| GPL. There has always been a lot of people who do not agree
| with his opinions.
| api wrote:
| But don't you get it? The purpose of FOSS is to provide free
| labor for billion dollar companies.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me
| an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters._
|
| If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train
| Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.
| cromka wrote:
| Case closed, everybody go home.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| If I ever receive monetary compensation for violation of the
| license on my repositories, I will personally deliver it to you
| in cash. It won't happen.
|
| I have a feeling Copilot is more of a tool for publicity than
| for development.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That statement sort of depends on how important your repos
| are
| swayson wrote:
| Very well put and refreshing. Thank you.
| hartator wrote:
| > Software licenses matter. Copyright matters.
|
| Some of us think is detrimental to humanity at whole.
| sangnoir wrote:
| True, but while they exist,they should be evenly applied
| warkdarrior wrote:
| If you abolish copyright, that will only make it easier for
| for-profit corporations to use FOSS. There will be nothing
| stopping them from using FOSS, unless people stop sharing
| their code altogether.
| syshum wrote:
| While True, if you abolish copyright then there is nothing
| preventing me from Installing Microsoft office on as many
| machines as I want never paying Microsoft a dime....
| Y_Y wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Copyright certainly matters. It's a big deal legally and
| economicically all over the world.
|
| Suppose that it's just a bad idea and shouldn't exist. Does
| that mean that I should release my code into the public
| domain? I think you could make a good case that even being
| totally opposed to copyright morally or pragmatically or
| otherwise, given that it currently is enforced in many places
| it's worthwhile to play along. For example, some people would
| prefer a world without copyright, but GPL their code, because
| it might prevent a greater evil.
| xxpor wrote:
| Software licenses have barely been tested in court, let alone
| how they apply to code injected and combined with other code
| via machine learning. You're extremely overconfident about how
| this will actually play out.
|
| For one, just because your code is covered by the GPL, it
| doesn't mean every single line in isolation is copyrightable.
| It has to demonstrate creativity. That's why you don't have to
| worry about writing for (int i = 0; i < idx; i++) {.
| austincheney wrote:
| A software license, like any license, is a permission to
| operate.
|
| > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is
| copyrightable
|
| It is if you can prove reproduction apart from your own
| original work (fair use). Unlike patents copyright doesn't
| protect uniqueness. It is only a shield from reproduction,
| and if reproduction is demonstrable to a court you are likely
| at risk.
|
| https://cws.auburn.edu/OVPR/pm/tt/copyrightvplagiarism
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is
| copyrightable
|
| Microsoft did _not_ just copy individual lines. They fed
| whole repositories into their model, ignoring the license (if
| it exists) even though they knew from the start that
| information generated by the model will be publicly
| available. Available usually out of context, but nonetheless
| - the scope of the input and intent are very clearly
| "everything" and "redistribution".
|
| Just adding a filter/ML model to the output shouldn't matter.
| I dare you to build a Copilot clone trained from leaked
| internal Microsoft code and then trying to argue the output
| is a bit mixed up.
|
| That is a clear violation imho.
| sobellian wrote:
| The search engine on Github also calls up entire pages of
| GPL licensed code verbatim. Does it run afoul of copyright?
| google234123 wrote:
| Copilot was trained on leaked internal Microsoft code
| that's on github at the moment. Anyway, everyone seems
| perfectly ok with training langauge models on copyright
| text.
| leereeves wrote:
| If a trained language model exactly reproduces
| copyrighted text, is there any question about whether
| copyright still applies?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| This is a useless hypothetical, no language models do
| that
| heavyset_go wrote:
| And yet there are plenty of examples of Copilot
| reproducing copyrighted code verbatim, like is does in
| this example[1] that was posted on HN.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
| dylan604 wrote:
| Everyone is not perfectly OK with training language
| models on copyrighted text. It's just that evilCorps do
| it anyways, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop
| them. I can't do anything. At best, I could get a Twitter
| account and complain to the ether. The copyright holders
| can't do anything against the might evilCorps, but that
| doesn't make them okay with it. The fact you believe this
| is just sad, and exactly what evilCorps want from you.
|
| This goes beyond fair use or satirical/comedic effect.
| They are training their models to output text in the
| style of the authors being absorbed. The style of is
| exactly the artistic effect that is being copyrighted.
| gradys wrote:
| Could you explain why you think training models on
| copyrighted text is illegal or copyright infringement or
| whatever else it might be?
| klyrs wrote:
| Training the models is fine. Applying the models, which
| reproduces copyrighted works without proper attribution,
| is where it gets sticky.
| dylan604 wrote:
| My explanation will not be popular here on HN, but I'm
| never one to shy away. Especially when asked directly.
|
| Buying a book, buying an audio CD, or buying a DVD/Blu-
| ray is granting the holder permission to read,listen,view
| that product as a single instance. You can lend them out,
| but that's all you're really allowed to do with them. The
| text,audio/video is not owned by you to do with as you
| please. People obviously do not like that, and argue
| making copies/backups is their right. Maybe that's
| acceptable, but we can agree posting them on torrents and
| sharing in any other manner from a copy made from the
| thing you have is not.
|
| Saying that, training a model on someone's copyrighted
| text is not part of the agreement of the usage of said
| text whether it's a copyrighted magazine, newspaper, or
| book. If the people doing the training reach out to the
| copyright holders and get specific permission to use
| their copyrighted material in such a manner, then go
| ahead. The fact that people feel like they can do
| anything without the common courtesy of asking for
| permission is troubling to me that we've lost something
| as a society. There's no acknowledgment that someone has
| created something by their own work so that the creator
| can do with it as they please. A large portion of people
| believe that because it was created they deserve/should
| be able to/etc do what ever they want with someone else's
| creation. Including getting paid for derivitave works
| from the original creation.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > The fact that people feel like they can do anything
| without the common courtesy of asking for permission is
| troubling to me that we've lost something as a society.
|
| I see this sentiment a lot in FOSS spaces but I don't
| really understand why. The role of judicial process
| _isn't_ to provide a guiding moral philosophy around
| social organization. Depending on the government in
| question that's either a role of government functions or
| isn't something that should be guided at all. The role of
| law often (and yes, not in all governments, but at least
| in the US) is to offer a contract between the state and
| the individual.
|
| I understand the potential for abuse here in using
| Copilot to regurgitate licensed works without adhering to
| the terms of the work's license, but I'm not fluent
| enough in law to know if this is illegal or not. Calling
| out and specifically applying strict limits this practice
| is certainly something I'm sympathetic to, and I'm very
| curious to see what the courts come up with. But swayed
| by a moral argument I am not.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In the realm of FOSS, I feel like it's not the same
| comparisons. The FOSS devs created the work, released
| that work with the express knowing that someone else
| could update/modify that work. Writing/art/videos are
| rarely released with copyright that allows this kind of
| modification. That's a huge difference. There are some
| FOSS releases that allow people to use for
| personal/private use while restricting commercial use.
| This is closer to the books/movies type of scenario.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I mean sure, but these are both legally defined works
| with licenses that govern their use. The difference is in
| the style of license. FOSS doesn't get a special moral
| valence because individuals are authors and they offer
| their work for editing and remixing under narrow
| circumstances. I mean, if Jeff Bezos today were to
| release code he wrote by hand with GPLv3 and were to cry
| foul over Copilot, I doubt anyone would care (or he'd get
| made fun of online.) Why does FOSS get treated so
| differently?
| liamwire wrote:
| > My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is
| this better than 'bring on the downvotes'?
|
| Moving on, I'll put this to you: you claim training a ML
| model against copyrighted text is in violation of the
| 'permission' granted by the rights holder. However, flip
| this on its head for a moment - that's basically all
| human brains do. Clearly, the greatest writers of our
| time haven't written their works in a vacuum. Rather,
| that historical reading and inspiration becomes
| sufficiently obfuscated that we deem something adequately
| creative enough to be granted its own copyright.
|
| Fundamentally, how does Copilot differ, other than
| perhaps being a poor implementation? Is it by not being
| 'adequately creative' enough? Is there some future
| version you could envision that would be, or is it the
| principle you're arguing against?
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't agree to your premise. Humans can consume
| creative works and be influenced, this is not in
| question. Unless one is an impressionist, they aren't
| going to try to recreate exactly the works done by the
| artists they have been influenced by. Even if an artist
| does something inspired/influenced by, they have pretty
| much stated that. Musicians cite prior bands, as do
| writers, painters, etc all credit those influences.
|
| I'm probably just a curmudgeon, but I don't understand
| the point of Copilot. So I'm probably not the best to
| opine about it. However, I am very opinionated about
| copyright in manner that typical flows against HN group
| think.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Copilot isn't intending to copy entire code bases either.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Human beings commit copyright infringement all of the
| time. People have been lifting riffs from music,
| sometimes unconsciously, forever. This is why clean room
| implementations are done sometimes when writing software.
|
| Also, you're taking the machine learning metaphor
| literally. AI models do not "learn", they're just
| statistical models, they don't understand anything. There
| is no comparison to human learning that isn't superficial
| or metaphorical.
|
| The real question is how Copilot is any different than a
| compiler, or lossy encoding or compression.
| josefx wrote:
| > it doesn't mean every single line in isolation is
| copyrightable.
|
| copilot is known to reproduce entire blocks of text including
| non functional parts like comments.
| api wrote:
| What about non-traditional-FOSS licenses? There is a lot of
| source-available not-OSI-compliant licensed software on
| GitHub like MongoDB, CockroachDB, etc., and that's clearly
| proprietary. If this thing is trained on that and generates
| what amount to snippets of that code then it's clearly
| violating those licenses.
|
| Then there's private repositories. If they included those in
| the training data set that's even more actionable.
|
| Personally I think this is software piracy at an absolutely
| unprecedented scale. Machine learning is just information
| transfer from the training data into weights in a model, a
| close relative of lossy data compression. Microsoft is now
| reselling all its GitHub users' code for profit.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Private repositories weren't included in the training data
| per-github, only public repos.
|
| This really doesn't give me much comfort though. Making a
| repo public doesn't imply anything, it could be "All rights
| reserved".
| ghoward wrote:
| You're right that code has to demonstrate creativity for
| copyright. But that also means that an algorithm, even a
| _transformative_ algorithm, cannot change copyright because
| an algorithm is not creative, by definition.
|
| This means that the output of any algorithm on copyrighted
| code is still under the original copyright. I mean, we still
| apply the copyright of the original to the output of
| compilers, even though compilers can be transformative with
| inlining and link-time optimization, to the point that it
| mixes disparate code in the same way Copilot does.
|
| In fact, I wrote some software licenses [1] that codify the
| fact that algorithms cannot change copyright.
|
| [1]: https://yzena.com/licenses/
| gradys wrote:
| You sound very confident about this, whereas copyright
| lawyers I've read discuss this issue seem much less
| confident overall, but lean toward thinking this would be
| fair use.
|
| What makes you so confident that this would not be ruled
| fair use?
|
| (And for people not familiar - if ruled fair use, it
| doesn't matter what the license is because fair use is an
| exception to copyright itself.)
| ghoward wrote:
| I have a feeling you did not read the FAQ of the
| licenses. I don't blame you, but they explain my
| position.
|
| Here's the relevant quote:
|
| > GitHub is arguing that using FOSS code in Copilot is
| fair use because using data for training a machine
| learning algorithm has been labelled as fair use. [1]
|
| > However, even though the training is supposedly fair
| use, that doesn't mean that the distribution of the
| output of such algorithms is fair use.
|
| My licenses say, basically, "Sure, _training_ is fair
| use, but _distributing_ the output is not. "
|
| The licenses specifically say that the copyright applies
| to any output of any algorithm that uses the source code
| code as all or part of its input.
|
| Now, I have not gotten a lawyer to look at my licenses
| yet (it's in the works), so don't use them yourself. But
| because everyone keeps saying that training is fair use,
| I'm fairly confident that only training is fair use.
|
| Of course, it might not be, but that would take more
| court cases and more precedent. I wanted to poison the
| well _now_ [2] to make companies nervous about using a
| model that was partially trained with code licensed under
| my licenses.
|
| [1]: https://valohai.com/blog/copyright-laws-and-machine-
| learning...
|
| [2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-
| copilot-and...
| seoaeu wrote:
| > My licenses say, basically, "Sure, training is fair
| use, but distributing the output is not."
|
| Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and
| isn't fair use...
| ghoward wrote:
| > Licenses basically by definition cannot say what is and
| isn't fair use...
|
| Yes. However, my licenses only say what people already
| say. Then the licenses go further and say, "But anything
| else is not allowed."
|
| Everyone else says training is fair use. My licenses
| agree. But they make it clear that I don't believe that
| anything else is fair use.
|
| Yes, these licenses must be tested in court. Except that
| they poison the well _now_.
| nybble41 wrote:
| It's mildly interesting that you've decided to express
| your personal opinion about what is or is not fair use
| within in your license text, but the fact is that if a
| use of the work is deemed to be fair use under the law
| then the terms of the license you're offering are
| completely irrelevant. Your permission is not required to
| make fair use of the work, so no one needs to agree to
| your license.
| ghoward wrote:
| > It's mildly interesting that you've decided to express
| your personal opinion about what is or is not fair use
| within in your license text, but the fact is that if a
| use of the work is deemed to be fair use under the law
| then the terms of the license you're offering are
| completely irrelevant. Your permission is not required to
| make fair use of the work, so no one needs to agree to
| your license.
|
| You do not seem to get it. Yes, I understand that if fair
| use applies, my licenses don't matter. I get that. I
| promise I do get that.
|
| The purpose of these licenses is to _sow doubt_ that fair
| use applies to _distributing_ the output of ML models.
|
| Lawyers are usually a cautious lot. If a legal question
| has not been answered, they usually want to stay away
| from any possibility of legal risk regarding that
| question.
|
| The licenses create a question: does fair use apply to
| the output of ML algorithms? With that question not
| answered, lawyers and their companies might elect to stay
| away from ML models trained with my code, and ML
| companies might stay away from training ML models on my
| code in the first place.
|
| That is what I mean by "poisoning the well." The poison
| is doubt about the legality of distributing the output of
| ML models, and it is meant to put a damper on enthusiasm
| for code being used to train ML models, especially for my
| code.
| bluGill wrote:
| While they are not tested, anything other than accepting the
| idea kills the idea of software completely. There is lots of
| room to change details, but somehow copyright and the fact
| that the code is copied into computer memory needs to be
| reconciled.
| xxpor wrote:
| I don't see how. It might kill specific ideological
| licensing of software code, but the idea it'd kill software
| as a whole is pretty unbelievable. Software is too valuable
| to society.
|
| As we're seeing, there's VERY little software where the
| specific algorithms or ideas in the software are what's
| valuable. The value comes from the ability to sell a
| service based on the software and operate it at scale. Like
| you said, how much SaaS is mostly open source stuff
| packaged up? Android is (sort of) open source, companies
| pay lots of people a lot of money to contribute to the
| Linux kernel where they give away the code they developed
| with that money, etc etc.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > Software licenses have barely been tested in court...
|
| OSS licenses have been litigated and upheld. Can't supply
| details of my own experience for confidentiality reasons but
| plenty of plaintiffs have prevailed in suits about violations
| of OSS license terms. My guess is the numbers are higher than
| you might think because a lot of the cases end in non-public
| settlements.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > You're extremely overconfident about how this will actually
| play out.
|
| I'd argue Microsoft too, was/is overconfident about how this
| would play out. I would have expected a little more caution
| on selecting the training data.
| hartator wrote:
| > We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and
| unjust, from our perspective.
|
| So, why call for white papers? I don't believe they will publish
| any papers that go against their views.
| meepmorp wrote:
| They have a position and they now want to support it with
| arguments, and they'd like it if people would help them do
| that.
|
| I think that's a backwards because it's putting the conclusion
| first then seeking to justify it, but to each their own.
| user-the-name wrote:
| No, they have a position and arguments to support it, but
| those have nothing to do with the machine learning aspects,
| just with the fact that the software is proprietary.
|
| They are asking for views on the machine learning, which they
| do not have arguments or a position on.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I think that 's a backwards because it's putting the
| conclusion first then seeking to justify it_
|
| Isn't that literally a lawyer's job?
| [deleted]
| meepmorp wrote:
| >Isn't that literally a lawyer's job?
|
| I guess, but then they should have their story straight
| before they start the astroturfing campaign.
| tyingq wrote:
| They know a couple of reasons for sure. They want more reasons,
| or more detail on other reasons for which they aren't as sure
| yet.
| humanistbot wrote:
| You seem to be unfamiliar with (edit: or object to) the very
| idea of lawyers.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Read the rest of the paragraph. They think it is unacceptable
| and unjust from certain perspectives that are trivial for them.
| However, there are other perspectives that are worth exploring,
| and that is what this is about.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| This is the FSF that put Richard Stallman back on the board? No
| thanks.
| quasarj wrote:
| Ahh someone who can't read for themselves, eh? go away
| muricula wrote:
| Is this constructive? I think it's reasonable to criticize an
| organization for its leaders, and question their actions
| accordingly. And he is on the board.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Anyone feel like FSF moved from maybe engineering idealists to a
| very lawyer driven type org?
|
| The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks
| actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities
| around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of
| the software to do what they want with it pretty much including
| putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc).
|
| Here's an opportunity to really advance in an interesting area
| with ML -> something that may open up programming to more people
| -> may advance computers ability to program and modify their own
| programs in the long run.
|
| And regardless of the FSF attorney stuff, places like china, tiny
| little LLC's with no assets will very likely use the wonderful
| amount of code on the web to develop solutions in this space,
| even if FSF claims everything is a violation. Where is the vision
| anymore from FSF.
|
| One thing that's been sad about the FSF -> it's gone from what I
| would consider a forward looking idealism sort of thing -> here's
| how we could do / make cool stuff that let communities work
| together -> to now sort of a legal compliance type org that
| really is focused on "actionable claims" " protected against
| violations" etc.
|
| Question - does the Linux community and other successful larger
| open source communities welcome the FSF and their attorney's into
| the discussion? I can hardly imagine the BSD's, the Linux folks
| really connecting anymore with them.
|
| Is there space for a different group, maybe a collection of
| actual develops shipping code in larger communities to get
| together, no FSF / SFC lawyers present, to think creatively about
| the future? What should we be working for, what is fair to
| everyone, what helps society, what works around pro-social
| community building?
|
| A tool that helps with cross language building blocks for common
| functions etc (stackoverflow on steroids) - just how bad is this?
| danhor wrote:
| This is more of a tangent, but I found this framing very
| interesting: > which keeps software free but allows users of
| the software to do what they want with it pretty much including
| putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc
|
| The FSF considers the user to be the one using
| cars/tivo's/other devices. In their view, this was a design
| flaw of gplv2 that it allowed locking out end-users of their
| devices.
|
| For Linux this was not the case. The important part that
| modifications/extensions were shared (and maybe even
| upstreamed), while the end user access wasn't important.
|
| The case of tivoization fractured the interest between the
| mostly moral "I want freedom for the end user" and the more
| immediately benefical "If you use my code, I want reciprocity
| for modifications".
|
| I personally believe that today the latter case won, even for a
| lot of non-gpl software that gets lots of contributions e.g.
| via github for lots of different reasons, but the moral case
| gets more dire.
|
| Looking at security for older (or shockingly often even
| current) devices, right to repair and lots of other issues
| concerning the effective loss of rights with more modern
| devices, the concerns of the FSF were often accurate, but with
| the increasingly hostile approach to "proprietary" IP and thus
| the exclusion of GPLv3 and similar licenses not palatable to
| the larger open source community.
|
| The approach to IP in china is also sometimes a lot different,
| see https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Right - FSF ended up with a user view. Problem was the
| developers are the one actually writing the code and picking
| licenses, and the FSF moved away from really talking with
| them. I think this was a big shift.
| e40 wrote:
| No. The FSF had lawyers from the beginning and always thought
| (I talked with RMS in the early 80's some) that enforcement was
| part of the plan.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Sure, but the GPLv2 was very freedom oriented. Enforcement
| practically was relatively sparse and more educational I
| thought. Ie, release the TiVo source code, but we don't care
| that Tivo's are locked down.
|
| Is anyone building strong communities on AGPLv3 / GPLv3? I
| feel the momentum shifted towards Apache / MIT style licenses
| unfortunately.
| detaro wrote:
| > _but we don 't care that Tivo's are locked down._
|
| They literally made the GPLv3 because they cared about that
| very much.
| slownews45 wrote:
| The FSF did GPLv3. The folks doing Linux etc did not.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| You asked if the FSF changed.
| vhold wrote:
| In case anybody is wondering about this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization
| blendergeek wrote:
| > Is anyone building strong communities on AGPLv3 / GPLv3?
| I feel the momentum shifted towards Apache / MIT style
| licenses unfortunately.
|
| While the _corporate_ momentum switched to Apache /MIT
| licenses, there are strong _communities_ built on AGPLv3
| /GPLv3.
|
| * Nextcloud - file hosting (AGPLv3)
|
| * Source Hut - git hosting (AGPLv3)
|
| * StreetComplete - OpenStreetMap editing (GPLv3)
|
| * F-Droid - Free Software "app store" for android (GPLv3)
|
| * NewPipe - alternative Youtube frontend (GPLv3)
|
| While these aren't necessarily used by large corporations,
| their individual communities are thriving and strong.
|
| The shift toward SSPL and Commons Clause licensing is
| another argument in favor of AGPLv3 licensing.
| Amazon/Google often won't touch your AGPLv3 code (and you
| can still sell proprietary licenses to other companies that
| can't/won't use AGPLv3).
| slownews45 wrote:
| (A)GPLv3 actually has seen some real growth corporate
| side -> it's used commonly by proprietary tech companies
| as sort of a poison license (Microsoft had some of these
| like SSPL).
|
| The way this works is all contributors are required to
| sign a CLA -> the corporate developer can then use their
| code under ANY license, and most importantly can
| integrate into propriatery products or sell to others.
|
| The code is then released as an AGPLv3 to be "open
| source" - but literally the only company with the "super"
| rights to license / make money off it is the corp dev.
|
| It's kind of genius -> so I think we may see more
| (A)GPLv3 stuff coming this way. The corp developer can
| then offer for example a hosted version of the software
| WITHOUT releasing all the related code! But anyone else
| would have to release their code.
|
| You an see how this is done here:
|
| https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/cla/
| gkbrk wrote:
| > The code is then released as an AGPLv3 [...] but the
| only company with the rights to make money off it is the
| corp dev.
|
| Actually anyone that has the AGPL code can sell and/or
| make money from it. People regularly buy GPL software and
| pay monthly subscriptions to hosted AGPL software.
|
| If you can't compete without having some code as "trade
| secrets"; that's your failed business model, not a fault
| of the license.
| necovek wrote:
| > But anyone else would have to release their code.
|
| Which I think is perfectly fair: you are getting a full
| product, and you can do with it as you please (including
| profit off of it), as long as you publish your changes
| too!
|
| The fact that the original copyright holder has the
| rights to close it off for future developments is
| completely natural, and if you do not want to allow them
| to do that, don't sign a CLA and fork. Oh, there's a cost
| in maintaining a fork? Pick your poison then :)
|
| To me what matters is that once you get the software, you
| have freedom to use and modify it. I am ok if you do not
| have the "freedom" to close it off. If you start being a
| bigger contributor than the original company, you avoid
| all of the problems with a fork, but you can't say you
| did _not_ benefit from the original AGPL release.
| simion314 wrote:
| >And regardless of the FSF attorney stuff, places like china,
| ....
|
| So your argument is if China does not care about license
| neither should we, the thing is I am fine with that, I know
| Windows source code is leaked so let's train an AI on it too
|
| I think is a clear sign that MS did not trained on proprietary
| code , it means that is not legal or not safe, so the question
| is why GPL or other licenses are safe, I think you need the
| authors or the licenses to give you the permission to use the
| code as training data in black box, locked, proprietary
| algorithms.
| laumars wrote:
| I'm all for advancing machine learning but given how much big
| corporations aggressively defend their IP, it's a hard pill to
| swallow if someone shrugs off a potential misuse of open source
| code. The law is the law and if it's ok for Microsoft to defend
| their copyrights then it's ok for the FSF to defend my
| copyrighted code too. The fact that I licensed it GPL was
| intentional -- if I didn't give a crap what happened to the
| code then I'd have used BSD or similar. But I _chose_ to place
| restrictions and I'm very much interested to see if training
| proprietary AI models are legally covered under those
| restrictions.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on
| folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building
| communities around that model (which keeps software free but
| allows users of the software to do what they want with it
| pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down -
| cars / tivo's etc).
|
| The users of the software are the owners of the devices. The
| distributors are the ones locking down the devices to prevent
| the users from modifying the software (often so that the
| distributors can control something else the users are doing).
|
| GPL is about end-user freedom (as opposed to software
| distributor freedom). This is why GPLv3 exists.
| slownews45 wrote:
| GPL used to be targeted at DEVELOPERS of software - the share
| and share alike model. These developers would in some cases
| use the GPL'ed software in locked down devices (many / most
| android devices are pretty locked down - but developers
| contribute to a GPL kernel).
|
| So yes, FSF created GPLv3 to focus on USERS freedoms, but the
| users are not writing the software - so it remains the devs
| who pick licenses.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The Free Software definition always put users first.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definit
| ion#T...
| ghoward wrote:
| I honestly wish I was in a position to write a whitepaper for
| this. However, I should not for several reasons:
|
| * I have already made my position clear in public, [1] so I could
| probably be identified.
|
| * I am not a lawyer, just some bloke who attempted to write FOSS
| licenses to combat ML on copyrighted code. [2]
|
| [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-
| and...
|
| [2]: https://yzena.com/licenses/
| senko wrote:
| > We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and
| unjust [...]. Activists wonder if there isn't something
| fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company
| building a service off their work.
|
| > We will read the submitted white papers, and _we will publish
| ones that we think help elucidate the problem_.
|
| Doesn't give me hope they're aiming for unbiased opinion. I would
| be _very_ surprised if any of the published papers don 't closely
| align with FSFs apriori position.
| user-the-name wrote:
| The part you removed is the crucial part that explains that
| paragraph.
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| Well, sure. They're looking for legal support for their
| position. They're not pretending to be an unbiased,
| disinterested observer.
| nescioquid wrote:
| It sounds like they have a legal premise and they want to work
| out the implications, not to open up discussion to every
| quibble about the FSF's values. Having an opinion on the legal
| issues around their licenses and values seems sort of essential
| to what the organization does.
|
| The word "unbiased" seems to be doing a lot of heavy work in
| your comment. The FSF is inherently biased towards its project
| -- how is that a problem?
| senko wrote:
| > The word "unbiased" seems to be doing a lot of heavy work
| in your comment. The FSF is inherently biased towards its
| project -- how is that a problem?
|
| That's straw-man, I never said (nor do I think) FSF should
| not be biased towards its project.
|
| However, I would be more willing to trust the results of this
| call if I had confidence that all solid arguments are
| presented, even if they're not aligned with FSF's agenda.
| Hiding them won't make them disappear - you might as well get
| as informed as possible about the issue, _especially_ if you
| care deeply about the issue and agree with the FSF.
| [deleted]
| zekrioca wrote:
| Interesting: In HN, a same link submitted at a different time get
| different # of upvotes.
|
| Same link, just 13h ago, but with 5x less upvotes than the one in
| here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27992894
| ghoward wrote:
| Because the US programmers were going to bed?
| zekrioca wrote:
| I'd expect HN to not let duplicates to be submitted.
| IvyMike wrote:
| From the FAQ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
|
| > Are reposts ok?
|
| > If a story has not had significant attention in the last
| year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we
| bury reposts as duplicates.
|
| > Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion
| is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the
| first place.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Attention to "in the last year or so". The same link was
| posted 13-14h ago, not "1 year or so ago".
| IvyMike wrote:
| They have explicitly stated that are ok with retrying
| recent overlooked stories just in case a story got missed
| or buried for whatever reason.
|
| They are also ok with reposting year+ old stories that
| did get significant attention at the time, since the new
| respost may find a new audience.
| zekrioca wrote:
| The main point is: Assuming the New section is a queue,
| and that the very same link is posted twice, should the
| first link be re-queued in the New section again? It was
| clearly a duplicate, although it was not flagged as such.
| ghoward wrote:
| I see. Well, it actually happens all the time.
| pkrefta wrote:
| I'm using Github to publish my code and seriously I don't care
| whenever Copilot was trained using it. I published it and in the
| end somebody can do anything with it without giving a damn about
| license, copyright etc - that's the truth of open-source.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _that 's the truth of open-source_
|
| No, that's _your opinion_ , which as it turns out also has no
| legal basis. For me, I want proper attribution from people who
| use my code. And for any code that I release that's under
| copyleft, I absolutely do want that license followed.
|
| You seem to be fine releasing your stuff into the public
| domain, and that's great that you want to do that, but you
| don't speak for everyone.
| laumars wrote:
| This is why there are a multitude of different open source
| software licences. Because some people care more than others
| about the terms in which their code is used by others.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| That is a valid position one can have.
|
| However other people for varying reasons have other ideas ...
| grepfru_it wrote:
| This was the same mentality that brought copyleft to the masses
| in 1984. While you may not care, there are others who do care
| about the sanctity of license agreements. This is an argument
| where staying silent means you accept this approach. Of the
| millions of open source projects, a large portion of the
| contributors ARE speaking up because they don't find this to be
| acceptable. I personally think copilot is the future and all
| this discussion is doing is going to bring a license usage
| feature to copilot (e.g. i want only or i do not want GPL code
| in my copilot suggestions)
|
| Please continue using GitHub as you were, but maybe consider
| acting on your words and either removing or changing licenses
| within your code that does not represent your ideals. Nothing
| is preventing you from releasing code into the public domain,
| so do that!
| Permit wrote:
| > Of the millions of open source projects, a large portion of
| the contributors ARE speaking up because they don't find this
| to be acceptable.
|
| Is this true? Is there really a large portion of contributors
| speaking up against this? I got the opposite sense, that it
| was a very small portion of contributors speaking up against
| this but I don't have any evidence one way or the other.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Well then you're a BSD-license kind of person.
|
| Not everybody is and that's ok too.
| nitrogen wrote:
| The BSD license still requires attribution and copyright
| notices visible to the end user.
| whazor wrote:
| I am curious about the results.
|
| Having tested copilot, most suggestions are based on existing
| code in your opened file. Furthermore, most snippets tend to be
| relatively short, where it feels more like a Stack Overflow
| answer than existing code.
|
| Of course it is possible to make the model generate longer pieces
| of code that are potentially GPL. But you would have to do
| certain effort for it. It also tends to adopt your coding style.
|
| But maybe the fact that there are no guarantees makes it unfair.
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