As a mature, skilled engineer, you wouldn’t mind sharing your knowledge—but you’d really prefer to do this on your own terms.
First, you might choose to distribute your code under a copyleft license to advance the OSS ecosystem. Second, the older you get, the more experience you accumulate, paradoxically the harder it is for you to find a job or advance your career in this industry—so, to maintain at least some source of motivation for tech companies to hire you, you may choose to make some of the source available, but reserve all the rights to it.
You’re fine making the source of your tool or library open for anyone to pass through the lens of their own consciousness and learn from it, but not to use as is for own benefit.
Now with GitHub Copilot suddenly you see the results of your labour you’ve previously made (under the above assumptions) public being passed through some black box, magically stripped from your license’s protections, and used to provide ready-made solutions to everyone from kids cheating at college tests to well-paid senior engineers simply lacking your expertise.
I hope it’s easy to spot how engineer’s interests in the above example are not necessarily aligned with GitHub’s, how this may be perceived as an unfair move disadvantaging veteran rank-and-file software engineers while benefitting corporate elites and investors, and subsequently has the potential to disincentivize source code sharing and deal a blow to OSS ecosystem as a whole.
First, you might choose to distribute your code under a copyleft license to advance the OSS ecosystem. Second, the older you get, the more experience you accumulate, paradoxically the harder it is for you to find a job or advance your career in this industry—so, to maintain at least some source of motivation for tech companies to hire you, you may choose to make some of the source available, but reserve all the rights to it.
You’re fine making the source of your tool or library open for anyone to pass through the lens of their own consciousness and learn from it, but not to use as is for own benefit.
Now with GitHub Copilot suddenly you see the results of your labour you’ve previously made (under the above assumptions) public being passed through some black box, magically stripped from your license’s protections, and used to provide ready-made solutions to everyone from kids cheating at college tests to well-paid senior engineers simply lacking your expertise.
I hope it’s easy to spot how engineer’s interests in the above example are not necessarily aligned with GitHub’s, how this may be perceived as an unfair move disadvantaging veteran rank-and-file software engineers while benefitting corporate elites and investors, and subsequently has the potential to disincentivize source code sharing and deal a blow to OSS ecosystem as a whole.