Is GitHub Copilot the death of open source?

I have two thoughts on this:

* Copilot isn't nearly as useful as some are making it out to be - I've been seeing thread on Reddit talking about how Copilot will mean devs will now be out of a job, and a bunch of other hot takes about what this means for the industry. I personally think that it won't be all that revolutionary, very useful, but it's not going to disrupt anything.

* The "Software vs Snippets" argument: Say you have an OSS project that is MIT licensed. Copilot learns from some of your code and offers suggestions based on what you wrote to another developer for say a helper function or a script. Technically yes, your License was violated and your code was stolen. But when you think about it on a more practical level it's not that big of a deal. The point I'm making is Software is all about composing a bunch of snippets into something of value. A dev ripping off my build script or key extractor helper function isn't the same as them ripping off my entire app. One is just fine, the other is not in my eyes.

Why would someone selling your code make it pointless to contribute to open source software? All the permissive open source licenses allow other people to sell your code anyway! I'm not saying what Microsoft did was right at all, but I don't think it massively changes the dynamics of permissive (or even a decent bit of copyleft) open source development.

You contribute to open source because you want open source software to be better for you and for others, and Microsoft's use of it doesn't really affect that equation much (to me, at least).

If, on the other hand, someone was contributing to copyleft software because they dislike proprietary software & the corporations behind it, I could see this affecting their decision making, but even in this mindset, what's the other option? If your goal is FOSS and user-modifiable code, not contributing and or not open-sourcing your code is worse than Microsoft taking bits of it! The best strategy for this perspective to me is to remove all your code from GitHub, put it up on SourceHut or something self-hosted, and tell others to do the same (and don't buy Copilot, and tell others!)

Perhaps my experience with Copilot is different, but I find that the code suggestions tend to model established patterns and best practices (sometimes) across algorithms, languages, and frameworks. I haven't seen any suggested code that surprises me with it's novelty or uniqueness. Many times, it's just interpreting my own code for patterns and saving me from some multi-cursor-fu.

The biggest value of Copilot for me is the time saved by not having to search Google and/or documentation. It feels like I'm working with a relatively knowledgeable pair programmer -- which is nice for a solo dev. The value compounds for me since I frequently switch between frameworks with pauses in-between.

Since there's concern across the open source community, maybe Microsoft should reconsider the business model and spin-off Copilot as a non-profit. The proceeds can be used fund the staff and servers required to run the service and profits can be shared with open source developers on Github.

People have been stealing open source code in much more meaningful ways for years. I'm more annoyed with, and think we'd be better off directing our ire at the countless embedded device vendors and commercial software vendors who ship GPL binaries with no source, rather than splitting hairs over CoPilot.

I find Copilot distasteful and frustrating, but I don't think the misappropriation of code it performs is particularly meaningful. I think it's worth pushing back on, surely, as a matter of principle.

But will it "end open source," or do I think about it when I make contributions to open source code or provide solutions to others? Absolutely not.

Many software engineers contribute to OSS for reasons that have little to do with money. They publish code in the open for free in the expectation that other engineers would look at it and learn from it, and while at that appreciate the effort and expertise of the original author.

Copilot takes this away, in that a megacorp now uses the above contributions to provide a paid solution that essentially removes the need for people to even know you exist while allowing them to use the results of your work.

I don't think it's a death of open source, but it's definitely a mini-death of Github. At least myself personally I'm inclined to switch to SourceHut, which so far seems to be trustworthy, no-bullshit and with clear business model.

People could copy-paste code without following licenses before too.

It might cause some people to lose faith in license enforcement, it might cause some people to lose faith in GitHub, but I don't see a scenario where it "kills" Open Source.

Does use of Copilot absolve the user from dealing with copyright and license infringements?

An author of infringed source code could always make a claim.

I can't imagine that it does.

That's a problem for releasing some things made with Copilot to the public.

And it's a gray-zone for closed-source software, for which any infringement could be hidden.

I don’t care if a contribution I make is regurgitated by a model. It doesn’t affect my willingness or reason to contribute, because it doesn’t somehow make my contribution any worse. I contribute somewhere, and what I contribute to gets better.

The copyright-vs-copilot thing is legally interesting, but I really can’t see who would stop contributing to projects because of it? My amateur armchair lawyer guess is also that using a nontrivial piece of copyrighted code without permission won’t be defendable by “copilot wrote that, I didn’t”, so copilot or not, code won’t magically just be washed of copyrights.

They claim it's fair use or somehing like that.

I am not sure either way tbh. It really depends wether it repoduces code segments verbatim or just fragments. To use writing as a metaphore, does it reproduce sentences or entire paragraphs. The latter seems iffy, the former seems ok to me.

Well I guess we have to invoke a strong copyright, that protects every piece of code, so that no one can steal any of it in any way. And then you'll have your death of open source. It's code, there shouldn't be any copyright to it.

Interesting that someone would define code being copied more broadly than it is intended to as the "death of open source". I'm not saying that licence violations are a good thing, but this is a weird take.

HN commenters cannot seem to decide if Copilot is not even worth $10 because what it can do is so basic and trivial or if it is somehow the "end of open source" because it can do so much.

The latter reaction seems hyperbolic. I have not used copilot yet so cannot comment on whether it is worth $10. It seems fairly useful but from what I have seen in demos it feels like fair use.

Open source code is open. It has likely been used to train or influence all sorts of static analysis, formatting and vulnerability tools. Are those also a problem?

Hopefully some court challenges will happen and we can get an answer as to the legality. Whenever things like this come up though, I wonder why people contribute to open source in the first place if they are going to be so bothered by their code being used by others. We all know this, or ought to, when we start contributing. There are companies that are going to make money from our contributions.

This is the price for free github.

All your codes are belong to us.

I feel like a broken record, but "Opensource is not Github" and "Github isn't opensource."

It's time people remember open source existed before Github and it will exist after it. If you don't agree with Github's direction and decision, please use something else.

I have been incredibly happy without Github for the last two years and never plan on going back.