35 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
35 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Rant: Stop whatever you are doing and learn how licenses work"
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date: 2022-06-22 10:46:00 +0300
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tags: copilot license github
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---
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Recently, Github [announced](https://github.blog/changelog/2022-06-21-github-copilot-is-now-available-to-individual-developers/)
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that they are making Github Copilot available for everyone. Previously, it was in Beta and you could get it through the waiting list.
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When I saw the news, I thought I can give it a try. But not so surprisingly it was not free. You have 3 ways to get it:
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- Pay the subscription fee and get it.
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- Prove you are a student and get it for free.
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- Be a maintainer of *a popular repository* and get it for free.
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I think I should be able to use it for free because I am a student but apparently they are not convinced yet. Anyways, that is a different
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story. I don't care if they will give me access to Github Copilot or not. It is not a big deal for me.
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But some people were really angry about how Github Team being vague while defining the criteria as "being a maintainer of a popular open source project".
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I think they are right to some extent. If all you need is having a few thousands stars for a project, you could easily get that. I know a lot of troll
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or low effort repositories that get a lot of stars because they are funny.
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Later, I found [another tweet](https://twitter.com/fatih/status/1539574219629105156) that explains how Github decides what is *popular*. According to
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this tweet, if you have a repository that is in top 1000 in one of the most popular 34 languages, you are eligible to get Github Copilot for free.
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This is better than the previous definition but you can still argue that it is not fair because one can create a package for checking if a number is
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even or not and get thousands of stars.
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You can criticize this, I get that. But do not come up with silly arguments to justify yourself. Like how on earth would you think that Github is doing
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something bad because $10/month is too much for this service? It is business man, you pay if you think it is worth it. That's it. *"I joined beta program
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and it was free, now they want to charge me if I want to continue using it. They did not tell me that."* Uhhm... What? Are you aware that what you are using
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is another company's service and they have all rights to do whatever they want with their service? How you guys even can build up arguments like that?! This is crazy!
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Some people argue that *"what Github is doing is wrong because they used open source projects **without consent**."* Another similar argument is that *"what
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Github is doing is evil because they used projects developed by community and now they are selling it without giving any money to the contributors of
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these projects."* Do you guys even have an idea what licenses stands for? If you don't want to some random person use your code, just license it that
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way. And if you licensed it with a GPL compatible or similar license you already gave rights anyone to use or sell your code. That is not Github's
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problem. That is your problem not understanding how licenses work. Stop complaining.
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