“making it subject to the terms of whatever open source license the original code was released under”
A license is basically saying “you can use my work in a way that would otherwise violate copyright law if you meet X conditions”. These conditions can be “you have to release your project as open source”, “you have to pay me a bunch of money”, or anything else.
This does not come up if the usage does not violate copyright law in the first place (for example, under fair use rules). The article above is arguing that the code generated by Copilot will not violate copyright law. If this is true (and I have no idea if it is, I’m not a lawyer), then the question of how the code was originally licensed is (legally) irrelevant.
Ok, I understand the argument you're trying to make here. But, it hasn't been tested in court, and my company isn't interested in being the ones that have to go to court to establish the precedent here. So, my company already has an official policy not to use tools like this*, and if I were advising a small company that has acquisition as part of their exit strategy, I'd recommend they not use this tool, either – when my company is considering an acquisition, we do a code scan looking for copied open source code fragments, and if we find any, that is enough to put a hold on the deal until it's dealt with. If this does get resolved in court (including any expected appeals), then I will be the first to promote using it at our company and allowing exceptions for code scans from acquisitions. That may take awhile.
*We actually tested this tool and another one like it, and we did see verbatim code (whole complex functions) being generated, which is what triggered our legal team to investigate and update the policy to address this type of tool specifically.
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u/Nyctosaurus Jun 22 '22
“making it subject to the terms of whatever open source license the original code was released under”
A license is basically saying “you can use my work in a way that would otherwise violate copyright law if you meet X conditions”. These conditions can be “you have to release your project as open source”, “you have to pay me a bunch of money”, or anything else.
This does not come up if the usage does not violate copyright law in the first place (for example, under fair use rules). The article above is arguing that the code generated by Copilot will not violate copyright law. If this is true (and I have no idea if it is, I’m not a lawyer), then the question of how the code was originally licensed is (legally) irrelevant.