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Really getting tired of the “but they trained it on our code” chat. GitHub has hosted your code for free, forever. Enjoying GitHub Actions? How about GHCR? When your license your code as MIT, and other permissive licenses, you free it up for anybody to make money from it.

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I'm honestly curious about the backlash. "Our code", so much FOSS, is used to make money for other people. That's why OSS is commercially viable. If this is a problem, then write a new license which prohibits commercial AI consumption of the code licensed by it and adopt it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

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Open source licenses almost all require attribution. In the case of copyleft licenses they require not adding additional restrictions. Commercial use is allowed, but the licenses still have to be respected. If you use CoPilot you're creating work derived from other projects.

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This is interesting, the attribution requirement must have an effective trigger. Is there a difference between human and machine self teaching from GitHub? How many similar lines of code from a studied project in original work obligates the author to the original license?

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The machine learning model itself is a derivative work. It's not a person, isn't actually an intelligence and hasn't actually learned how to write code. It's a language model deriving directly from what it has seen before. I don't see how it'd bypass licensing of the code.

9:04 PM · Jun 22, 2022Twitter Web App

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It doesn't necessarily matter if it copies one project in particular. In many cases there is 1 company with ownership over a vast amount of code written by their employees (such as Google). Individuals could assign copyrights to an org or take collective action even without it.

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I don't think it needs to be explicitly stated that a machine learning model created from code is a derivative work but licenses could start explicitly stating it going forward if the licenses aren't being respected with how they previously existed. It's a simple thing to state.

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