> * They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
That's a huge stretch for a few reasons. First, the reliability of GitHub.com is very poor and it has had tens of incidents in the past few months. Second, their hosted solution, GitHub Enterprise, is notoriously poor, difficult to maintain, always late with features. Third, their main competitor, GitLab, which is open core, was kicking their ass for years with features and quality until GitHub got the unlimited funds of Microsoft to be able to even come close. More to the point, there are tons of good quality open source software, and tons of really poor quality closed source. Openness of code matters little for quality (besides the fact that with open source at least you have the option to see why and fix).
Regarding Copilot, they're ignoring licenses, training models on everybody's code, and selling the result as a service. Sounds very sketchy.
OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.
> They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics.
ICE policies aside, you should be interested in immigration politics because they're important to people and businesses. Apathy is a bad thing here.
> They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.
hahahaha, there are plenty of open-source not-for-profit companies with high quality products and many many many more closed-source for-profit companies with terrible products. See also Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office.
> OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.
This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. Who needs attribution when people are actually _using_ something you made; you saved someone a good deal of time trying to write a solution themselves, perhaps.
And if that's your goal, then you release your code under one of the more permissive licenses (MIT, CC0, etc). As the developer and copyright holder, that's totally your right and privilege, and that's how you exercise it. When your license explicitly states that there's terms of use attached, then copyright law ensures that violation of those terms invalidate your rights to use the code. If we're gonna say that copyright law doesn't apply to open source licenses then we have to go ahead and in all fairness state that copyright law no longer applies to proprietary software licenses either, because it's the same laws that protect both. Making something open source doesn't mean you're just giving people the right to do anything they please with the code unless you explicitly state that you're doing so by choosing a properly permissive license for your code.
> This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer.
That's fine if your project says that. But there are a very many of projects which specifically say otherwise.
Right I'm just saying your argument only holds for licenses like GPL, not in general as you suggested.
edit:
Not implying you're wrong, just moreso that there's a large chunk of people who aren't going to be motivated to fight on your behalf. I understand there are some useful areas such as hardware drivers for GPL, but it's simply not an IP constraint that sounds at all fun to work on as a volunteer.
That's true. I use MIT myself (although I don't care if people cite me).
I guess this just all seems rather activist to me but people aren't seeing the big picture; our jobs as programmers are about to change in a very big way. It won't be long before more competition enters the space (e.g. Salesforce and Amazon) and ultimately it won't matter if this model saw some GPL/MIT code because the next one will work twice as well without having seen any of it.
People are seeing the big picture. That's all the more reason to make sure that, as new tools get developed, they treat it as a requirement to actually respect Open Source (licensing, credit, provenance, copyleft, patent non-aggression, and all the other reasons people use such licenses), rather than just abusing it as an input.
Perhaps I should have said idealistic. I mean I've seen several people make demands like they're somehow already in a courtroom with Microsoft. No mention made of the fact that this is likely covered under fair use. If it isn't, then basically every deep neural net trained on a web dataset is in violation. This means open works like from University at Heidelberg (Latent Diffusion, VQGAN) or EleutherAI (GPT-J) would be impossible.
Like, maybe you could all get together and learn how machine learning works and train your own clean model? That feels far more positive and in the spirit of progress to me. I guess from my point of view it's clear - no laws will save you from the next wave of large language models. The weights are trivially distributed meaning once it's trained it's more just a fact of life we all have to deal with. So making demands when you have basically zero leverage rather than admitting defeat and working within the new constraints of progress.
I just feel like it's an inherently philosophical position and people are acting like code theft hasn't been common practice for the history of all software.
You mean two of the most successful pieces of commercial software in the history of modern computing? Because as easy as it is to pretend they're terrible: to millions of users and orgs, they simply aren't.
Eh, first mover advantage counts for a lot. It doesn't necessarily mean the software is good.
Burning coal for generating energy was very "successful" and had great adoption. It's still a terrible method for the environment, and we can feel free to regard it as negative.
In this analogy, Microsoft products would be like generating energy by burning garbage, aka a dumpster fire.
You'll want to pick your analogies carefully, because burning garbage for energy when the alternative is a US style landfill is literally better in every way. But let's not strawman: first mover advantage is very real, but it's been literal decades of competition, and plenty of folks moved off of MS products. Hundreds of millions, however, have not. And still voluntarily install them. Because for them, they work the vast majority of the time, and don't cause any more gripes than Apple or Linux do for others.
That's the thing though, burning coal works fine as well and doesn't cause any more gripes than hydroelectric or solar. Without voluntary moves to other products, or regulatory changes, it would have taken likely much longer before we stopped doing it. It's not an exact analogy, but there are parallels – the linked article is suggesting voluntarily stepping away from Microsoft code hosting, and others in the thread have suggested regulatory controls.
> because burning garbage for energy when the alternative is a US style landfill is literally better in every way.
Now that you say it, I do remember reading that Sweden burns garbage for energy. I would have thought that the main problem would be arbitrary emissions from the plant, but from the plan of a typical one, those are trapped and/or filtered [1]. I still think that in the US this would be harder, since people are probably prone to throwing more things in the garbage than they should; and don't recycle as much as the Swedes do.
Indeed. A number of other places in Europe looked at the economics of landfills and went "yeah: no. Even with the cost of gas filters, literally burning garbage for energy is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than making a time bomb by burying it".
Being successful as a business has as much or more to do with market power than with code quality.
I am lucky that I can avoid their products. But millions of users and orgs can't because that's what others around them use. So they're stuck with it no matter how much worse it is than open-source alternatives.
In 2022, it really isn't "you're stuck". Even if your org uses MS prodcucts, there are interoperable open source suites these days. The problem is that they're shit. Yes, they work for small documents, but star/sun/open/libre/EtcOffice all fall over when you do something as simple as trying to sort a 30,000 row spreadsheet on several column criteria.
(and yes, that is trivially simple. If your software can't do that in a performant way, you don't understand what product you're trying to out-compete)
It's not that there's no alternative, it's that the alternatives are just not good enough when it comes to "I need this stupidly complicated thing, thanks to 20 years of spreadsheet formula history at my organization that I have zero power to even remotely change, done in seconds. Not minutes".
* They make money from Co-Pilot? Great!
* They sell software to ICE? Good. Why wouldn’t they? I’m not interested in anti-immigration-enforcement politics.
* They’re a closed-source for-profit company? Great! That’s why their product is high quality.