✨ Nora Tindall  🪐

Take the currying example - there aren’t a million ways to write it. Same with inserting the text to the GPL.

So it’s no more a license violation than having seen a GPL currying function in your life, and writing a new one.

More thorny is the moral question. The first objection people seem to raise is the “but what if I didn’t want my code used like that?” - which, fair enough. Except it’s licensed on GitHub explicitly allowing it. The sharing and learning is the heart of free software.

The second is that it’s against the spirit of the gpl. Now this I totally get. If you want your code to create more free code, but the bots can regurgitate it to the proprietary masses (essentially), that’s a big problem.

The response to this is relatively solid though - there is more to a program than a set of just functions. a human has to know, what the program is supposed to do. The AI can’t “write a program for you”. So we’re back to “if you see a function, did you copy it or not”?

I expect we will see licenses that explicitly forbid this use case in the GPL context.

The next is the ethical src argument - that this is another example of how open source defaults to helping business, governments, military, etc. that as producers we have the right to say how we want our work consumed.

This is just as valid with copilot as it is with a repo full of mit licensed code. Only more pernicious, perhaps, because it’s possible the ethical licensed code got used in a training corpus. That feels like absolutely a problem morally, if not legally.