natefinch

Copilot is software, it can't be the author, just like the OS isn't the author when you copy and paste. Authors have to be humans.

Presumably because you don't have the right to grant github those permissions, only the copyright owner does.

AI can code low level stuff. This one function. This small piece of logic. What it can't do is conceive of how to take a bunch of different functions and put them together to produce an actual product. It can't tell you if you should use postges or mongo. Programmers will always be needed, we'll just move up the stack, and we'll produce more value per hour of our work, justifying our high salaries.

Compare the visible output of someone writing in assembly vs someone writing on top of a modern web framework. Is assembly harder? Yeah. But the web framework is going to give you a usable product in a fraction of the time with way more features. And that's worth more money to the company you work for.

It's always going to be a knowledge worker's job. It's always going to reward experience and creativity and attention to detail. A lot of programming is looking at the world, seeing a gap in what exists, and figuring out what best fits that gap. An AI can't do that. Programming is making 1000 tiny decisions that can't possibly be specified completely by a product manager and need a human to weigh the tradeoffs.

Well, if the entire thing was generated, then no (according to the first link I posted above), since it was not produced by a human. However, no useful program is going to be entirely written by an AI, so any real program would have quite a lot of user input (I regularly will take what copilot suggests and then tweak it to what I specifically want). And then, yeah, it's copyrightable.

Also, there's no way for anyone to know what portion of code that I commit was hand written vs. generated, so you kind of have to treat it all as written by the committer anyway.

Though this does bring up interesting questions about what happens with things like automated PRs that fix bugs / update dependencies... are those then non-copyrightable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's still 100% true of the examples I mentioned. There's always a higher level to consider. When we moved to C, we could stop worrying about what registers we were using. When we moved to python/Java we could stop worrying about managing memory. When we moved to web frameworks we stoping writing the guts of our servers. And if anything, programmers have become even better paid, despite so many more people in the industry.

Anyone can already generate proprietary code that is identical to your GitHub project's code just using copy and paste.

For people that care to respect copyright, there's a copilot setting to block exact copies of code in the training set (which only happens a tiny percentage of the time, unless you're actually trying to make it happen).

For people that don't care to respect copyright, git clone is a way more efficient way to violate your license.

I'm sure that's what people said when they went from punch cards to assembly, and from assembly to C, and from C to Java.... and yet, here we are. Tools that let us write higher level code faster, just allow us to create more complicated software in a reasonable amount of time.

There's a big difference between reverse engineering (i.e. intentionally writing software that behaves identically to another piece of software), and writing your own code to solve your own problem that may superficially contain small portions of the similar logic as some other project. Copyrighted code has to be sufficiently creative and unique to qualify, otherwise after the first person wrote code to parse json from a web request, no one else would be able to do the same thing.

Familiarity with the UX and conventions on that platform. Almost everyone knows how to make a PR against a GitHub repo. But some random other code hosting site? It would be a lot less familiar, and people would have to spend time making an account and figuring out how to contribute.

Even low barriers of entry can cause a big drop in user engagement.

There's a setting on GitHub that blocks any suggestions that exactly match code in the training set. I doubt you'd ever get in trouble for code that was similar in structure but different variables etc from existing licensed code (especially since most small snippets of code are not terribly unique to begin with).

I definitely never contributed to open source before github was around.

I think it's like any social network. It grows in value with how many people use it. Yes, you can host your own public git repo or even your own gitlab, but then there's a barrier of entry to contribute to your code, and it's a lot harder for others to discover it.

disclosure: I work for github

It's still free with no payment for existing (beta/technical preview) customers. There was a github bug with some auth token nonsense that was causing problems, but all technical preview users should still be free for 60 days.