I completely agree with Tomas. The neural network weights should be given the same software license as the code it has been trained on and they need to do more to support and FOSS analog, as the technology.

I am expecting a conversation with Nat Fridman on a collaboration to bring Copilot to emacs. If he contacts me I will raise this issue.

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 7:30 PM <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 11:52:41AM +1200, Shane Mulligan wrote:
> Hi Stefan and dick,
>
> * Reponse to Stefan
> ** Capabilities of "GPT-3+vscode" (Copilot)
> Copilot uses a specialised version of GPT-3 called codex which is optimised
> to generate code.

GPT-3 is not free software [1]. Only the service is accessible to us,
mere mortals.

As for Copilot, one could even argue that it harvests [2] free software
at the costs of all of us.

As far as I am concerned, I'll put as much distance as I can between
myself and Copilot (or Github, for the same reasons).

I often asked myself how Github could have been worth $7 billion to
Microsoft. Now I begin to understand.

Cheers

[1] "Microsoft announced on September 22, 2020 that it had licensed
'exclusive' use of GPT-3; others can still use the public API to
receive output, but only Microsoft has access to GPT-3’s underlying
code."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

[2] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/
https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright/

- tomás