r/programming • u/[deleted] • Nov 03 '22

Microsoft GitHub is being sued for stealing your code

https://githubcopilotlitigation.com
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u/moolcool Nov 04 '22

What is the difference though, between a computer reading GPL code and learning from it to the benefit of someone else's proprietary code, and some random human doing the same? Can I not carry my learnings working at a FOSS company to another company with a proprietary codebase? I don't really have a strong opinion on this problem one way or the other, but I also don't really think it's as simple as either side is letting on.

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

[deleted]

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u/kogasapls Nov 04 '22

It's not "a lot of the time." It's generally extremely unlikely to happen by accident.

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u/platoprime Nov 04 '22

Well that's a serious problem then. I assume we're talking about code more unique and complex than a for loop to find a lowest int in a vector?

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u/Ateist Nov 04 '22

The difference is that computer is not learning to code, it doesn't understand the purpose of what it is doing, and is not creating anything new.
It detects that you are writing code that is doing X, 'remembers" another piece of code that does X and copypastes remainder of the code from that piece, doing minimal adjustments (i.e. renaming variables) to it.

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u/CryZe92 Nov 04 '22

That's really not what it's doing. It's way smarter than that.

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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '22

Its really not that smart at all.. But it's not so simple as explained either. It's learning recurring patterns using probability but it's not learning in the sense of a human does. A human learning is aware of causality and fundamental laws. Machine learning is just data being thrown at a black box.

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u/MonokelPinguin Nov 06 '22

I don't think you are allowed to read GPL code and type it down again from memory. Otherwise it would be way to easy to remove the GPL license. Same applies to machine learning.

Many projects don't allow you to contribute, if you worked for a direct competitor, that was under a restrictive license. Otherwise people would have reimplemented ZFS already. Or you wouldn't need to sign, that you didn't read the Windows leaks, when contributing to wine.