We have companies literally taking the whole Linux kernel and not following the license out there. There is no way the legal system gives a shit about AI generating the same textbook degrees_to_radians function.

Copilot never generated anything for me that would justify any kind of copyright.

Conversely, we have Oracle suing Google successfully for billions over function and property names. Eventually the Supreme Court overturned the result but how many businesses want a fight that expensive?

It'll be highly dependent upon the type of output it generates.

I've played with it again recently because of the updates around disabling open code and such, and it still strikes me that it's not worth the potential risk.

Even setting aside the "could I get sued for this" question, the value just isn't there; half the time functions are just poorly written, inefficient, or buggy. For very simple actual math stuff (e.g.: a function to replicate any moderately complex spreadsheet function) it seems to work well. It seems to really struggle with common boilerplate stuff like simple HttpServer in Java, Flask blueprints, and so on. It may be bias due to the projects I've worked on, but I don't do a lot of my own implementations of calculating compounding interest rates, incredibly simple array slicing, or testing if a given number is prime.

You mentioned Supreme Court, and I feel obligated to point out that one can literally now no longer speculate on what odd judgements they may now hand down.

They may find that SCO owns Linux for all we know… vote. Yesterday would have been ideal, but moving forward, remember to vote and remember which party hates common sense

Yeah, but that still feels like an edge case compared to the hundreds of small software assets produced by companies every day. In most cases those things don't even have the potential to get to an "Oh god we pissed off Oracle" size

I worked for over a decade at a Fortune 500 investment bank. I suspect they'll be very wary of Copilot, as well. I wouldn't lump all non-tech companies together.

Not gonna stop disgruntled employee #0151 from using it!

I think you underestimate the ability of Fortune 500 IT departments to lock down laptops and workstations. It's difficult, but far from too difficult.

I have heard these days a lot of programmers in these companies do all of their development inside of docker or VMs so they can actually get stuff done without filling out an approval form to update their linter.

At least where I worked, the HTTPS proxy blocked most downloads. Most software these days can install fine for a local user. It's more a matter of getting the installer. But, it was a pretty easy process for non-GPL3 open-source software: fill out a web form with the URL for the installer/source tarball and a URL for the license, wait a few hours, and the installer has been virus scanned and in available in the internal mirror repository of installers.

We had internal repositories. You go to a website, give a URL for the library or executable/installer you want to use, and a URL for the license it's under. A few hours later, you get an email that it has been approved, downloaded, virus scanned, and is available from the internal repository.

I think the HTTPS proxies necessary to reach the outside would block the communications necessary for Copilot to work.