This was a pretty big deal when Microsoft started doing it, and they’re now being challenged in court.
GitHub is the center of the open-source software universe. They're the biggest, and it's not even close. It's where us software developers from all over the world keep code for collaboration with others (I moved my business stuff to GitLab).
In the beginning, it was free, open source love, no license issues and no corporate man gonna' keep us down. You could share code with strangers and nobody caught anything. If you had a bad trip, it was whatever. It was a beautiful time, man.
Then Microsoft came along in 2018 with their suits and truckloads of cash and bought GitHub. To put another way, Microsoft bought most of the software code on the planet in one move. Think about that.
When you write code, it belongs to you, like a piece of music, and you'll protect it with a license, even if it's in a public repository and you intend to share it with the world and let anyone do with it as they please (typically GPL).
You also have private repositories, where you might keep code hidden from the public, like if it's proprietary for a client project, or some secret app, or whatever.
So what does Microsoft do?
They say "Cool, thanks everyone! We're going to go ahead and take all of your code and feed it into our new artificial intelligence product, called Copilot, that helps write code for developers (like autocomplete on crack) who pay for this new service."
What’s the most used programming IDE (a desktop app that makes things easier when writing code)? It’s Microsoft’s VS Code, and that’s not close either.
Think of it this way: Microsoft has the most popular IDE in the world, the largest software repository in the world stocked with code from coders all over the world, and an artificial intelligence project that brings both together and makes coding easier. Actually, the jury is still out on that:
When I said “autocomplete on crack”, what did I mean? This quick 53 second video is a short example of what I’m talking about.
If you’re a coder, at some point you’ve received input or some data that requires pattern matching. I have the common REGEX stuff memorized, but usually I have to look up the pattern, and at my age, that’s a slow process. What if you could just specify what REGEX pattern you want in a comment and the IDE writes it for you?
That’s pretty damn amazing. When I first saw that I knew we’re entering a different world.
So, what does this mean and what’s the big deal?
Let's say you spent countless hours of time and money, late nights and many pots of coffee, blood, sweat, and tears working on projects. Now, if someone signs up for Copilot, they can be using YOUR CODE in their projects!
I haven’t Copilot, because it wouldn’t feel right, but many are, and it’s good to see the libtard coders suddenly realize they like private property rights after ranting against capitalism forever. It will be funny when the commie judge, put in place by the communists the commie programmers supported, slaps this lawsuit down. I’ll eat my keyboard if this gets far.
In closing, a few snippets from the Bleeping Computer article:
"It appears Microsoft is profiting from others' work by disregarding the conditions of the underlying open-source licenses and other legal requirements," comments Joseph Saveri, the law firm representing Butterick in the litigation.
To make matters worse, people have reported cases of Copilot leaking secrets published on public repositories by mistake and thus included in the training set, like API keys.
Butterick also touched on another subject in a blog post earlier in October, discussing the damage that Copilot could bring to open-source communities.
The programmer argued that the incentive for open-source contributions and collaboration is essentially removed by offering people code snippets and never telling them who created the code they are using.
"Microsoft is creating a new walled garden that will inhibit programmers from discovering traditional open-source communities," writes Butterick.
"Over time, this process will starve these communities. User attention and engagement will be shifted [...] away from the open-source projects themselves—away from their source repos, their issue trackers, their mailing lists, their discussion boards."
Fuckin Gates is evil epitomized!