I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
If you want everyone to have access to your code, "everyone" includes people you don't like.
If the license says they can copy and redistribute it then that's exactly what they can do - and that's your choice as a software author.
You're perfectly free to make a license that says your code can only be used by people or companies with less than $1,000,000 turnover if you want, but bigness and richness don't always correlate well with any one person's idea of "morally good".
But you're not paying for your code. You're paying for the resources to run an AI assistant that has gleamed understanding from looking at lots of code examples.
Andrew, there are people like you and me who write code in our own repository on github, microsoft is giving those code for copilot training for their profit.
My opinion is that every developer should be able to choose whether his code can be used in AI or not. And Microsoft or any other company that offers tool similar to copilot should respect that and other licenses
Life long tech nerd.
Started soldering at ~12.
Started coding at ~19.
Cabinet maker for over a decade.
I write software for cabinet manufacturing and for my employers.
I don't really see how microsoft selling access to an AI assistant on their server impacts open source.
You write code for free. They use it to train their AI and potentially you are the buyer of your own code.
If you want everyone to have access to your code, "everyone" includes people you don't like.
If the license says they can copy and redistribute it then that's exactly what they can do - and that's your choice as a software author.
You're perfectly free to make a license that says your code can only be used by people or companies with less than $1,000,000 turnover if you want, but bigness and richness don't always correlate well with any one person's idea of "morally good".
You hire a person, you train them on your code and potentially you are paying the wages of someone reproducing your code.
That is the problem, we have to pay for our code
But you're not paying for your code. You're paying for the resources to run an AI assistant that has gleamed understanding from looking at lots of code examples.
Andrew, there are people like you and me who write code in our own repository on github, microsoft is giving those code for copilot training for their profit.
What about companies that sell products that use React? That's open source and the companies make profit.
My opinion is that every developer should be able to choose whether his code can be used in AI or not. And Microsoft or any other company that offers tool similar to copilot should respect that and other licenses
Yes, that would be great
Engineer Man had a good video about GitHub Copilot:
youtube.com/watch?v=b9u3ZAGQmT0
thanks, I will check that .