> People are probably angry because this is yet another case of a big multinational corporation abusing unclear or difficult to enforce legislation for profit.
it's worse than that: it's Microsoft trying to completely undermine the concept of open source
meanwhile: they're unaffected as their high-value proprietary code remains private and doesn't train the model
There is zero rationale why Microsoft could not do it without buying GitHub. Hell, they could have trained the model from GitLab or Bitbucket public repos.
They need developer mindshare and they lost a lot of developers in the 2000s. Buying GitHub (and being involved in 100s of projects) brings this mindset of Microsoft as a developer company back to developers. Like as an advertisement platform/branding for some novel technology like this CoPilot.
It was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment. It’s very unlikely they were even planning this when they bought GitHub. While you’re completely right about their rationale, a lot of people were at the time concerned about the acquisition, and it feels now a bit short sighted to burn all the good will they have generated by an act like this which undermines open source.
I think the rational for buying it was they were the single largest user of it, and were concerned about funding stability.
Does anyone have the numbers before they bought github, I saw them once, don't remember the values, just remember being shocked at what percentage of the total github code base was Microsoft. I had no idea they were using it at all.
More explicitly, how would a license that gives everyone the right to copy, modify and redistribute source code for any purpose without compensation or attribution have prevented Github from building a tool that copies, modifies and redistributes source code without compensation or attribution?
