lindenksv1

I am a lawyer and tried to find this new language but none of the legal documents I looked at appear to be updated to reflect any of this. Microsoft has a lot of different docs and it's a little confusing but the ones for Copilot are straightforward and none of those have changed any indemnity-related provisions since the spring.

OP here. If you own the copyright to a work, you can license it in any way you like. You can offer it to some people under a commercial license and to other people under an open source license. Many entities practices dual (or tri or whatever) licensing. When you post things on GitHub, you are essentially dual licensing your work. You're providing it under a very broad license to GitHub and you are providing it under an OSS license (or whatever you like) to other GitHub users. Neither license takes precedence. One license applies to one group of people and the other license applies to the other group of people.

This is very similar to what happens when you sign a contributor agreement before contributing code to an open source project. When you sign the contributor agreement, you're granting a very broad license to your work to the project maintainers. They can then license your work out under any license they want. But likewise, because you are not granting them an exclusive license, you're free to put your contribution license out into the world under any license of your choosing separate and apart from the project that you contributed it to.

Technically, I think the scenario you're describing with AGPL code may well be possible and legal. But practically, I think people would stop using GitHub if they felt that doing so would lead to GitHub/Microsoft undercutting their projects, stealing their customers, or essentially stripping the project of any AGPL obligations. I think that from a business perspective, they're really gambling on the idea that developers will see Copilot as a big boon rather than a value suck. Time will tell whether their gamble has paid off.

Kate Downing here. This is an excellent question. So, just like YouTube, GitHub would likely argue that they are protected by the DMCA and that so long as they comply with DMCA take-down requests, they are not liable for copyright infringement (direct or indirect) for third party content posted to GitHub by people other than the copyright owners. Remember that the DMCA effectively shifts that due diligence you speak of away from providers of online services and onto copyright holders themselves. Without the DMCA, many businesses that rely on user-generated content just wouldn't exist because that due diligence isn't possible at scale - it's often not even possible for individual pieces of content because the publication of any copyrighted work can be very obscure and because in the US you can hold a copyright without formally registering it.

In practice, I think the entire open source world knows that people post each other's open source code on GitHub. Even projects that have very purposefully chosen to primarily use other services or self-host their source code are well aware that their code gets mirrored on GitHub and/or included in other people's repos on GitHub. Up until now, I don't think this has been controversial and I don't think GitHub gets a lot of takedown requests for this practice. I think most developers see this as a feature, not a bug. Copilot might make people rethink whether or not they want to start sending take-down requests but that'll be a tough call for a lot of people because withholding code from GitHub to avoid its usage in Copilot also effectively means making their code less easily available to the rest of the world. It may be very disruptive to other projects that include the copyright owner's code in their own projects.

The problem is that they continue to be pushed out further and further from their jobs every year because cities like Palo Alto keep adding thousands of jobs and almost no housing. That means professionals like me get pushed out of PA, move somewhere cheaper, and end up pushing out people that make less. All of these things are tied together and at the end of the domino what you get is homelessness which we've seen spike in the last 5 years.

The point is that if two professional salaries aren't enough to buy a home in Palo Alto, then it highlights how much everyone else must be struggling. It highlights just how far away all of our service workers must live. Highlights just how miserable housing prices and commutes have gotten for the vast majority of people in the Bay Area who aren't lucky enough to have two professional salaries. If two professionals are, according to you, expected to have a half an hour commute, then everyone else is melting into their car seats every day.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Yes, I personally can go live 30 minutes away. So how far away should the teachers live, then? The police? Because if I can afford San Mateo, then that means they largely can't. So where are they going? Is it acceptable for them to be coming up to PA from Gilroy? Tracy? Stockton? At what point do we say that we've created a ridiculous system in which people are needlessly spending years of their lives in traffic and throwing rent money in the toilet all because we can't build some more apartment building next to our jobs centers? I'm not insisting that city work live or own in PA, I'm highlighting that they can't own anywhere near PA, since, as you state, even 30 minutes out of PA is where two-income professionals can afford, not them.

You can only build multifamily housing in 3% of the city. It's illegal everywhere else. You can't build more than 3 stories in most places - it's illegal. The supreme cost of housing here comes partially from the fact that you can only build a tiny number of units on land that could otherwise hold much more. So you split the cost of land among, say, 5 condos, and not 20. If you're paying 1/5 of the cost of the land and not 1/20 of the cost of the land when you buy your condo, it's obviously much more expensive.

The problem in the Bay Area is that since 2010, we added about 500,000 jobs and only 50,000 housing units. Roughly speaking, jobs gives you a sense for demand and housing units give you a sense for supply. Our jobs-housing ratio is completely out of whack. That's what makes the Bay Area so expensive. I actually don't believe any of the nonsense about this being a "destination area" or that there is "insatiable demand" - the demand is directly driven by job growth and you can see that plainly. People are not moving here from Nebraska and taking on housing that is multiple times more expensive just because it's pretty here- they're doing it because they got a job offer here. So no, Topeka and Detroit don't have this problem because their jobs growth isn't so far out of whack from their housing growth.