Although I'm aware that this tool is a boon to many, particularly those with impediments like RSI, I still have to echo what a number of other comments say: There really is a very large proportion of adult software developers in the market who are simply too young to have lived through the EEE Microsoft era. Add on to that the proportion of old-enough Microsoft-brand "dotnetter" software developers who simply don't care as long as they get to sit comfortably within C#, Visual Studio and Azure.
After that, what are you left with? A small enough proportion of developers, and Microsoft evidently thinks so, who don't know, and/or don't care, and/or don't have the time to fight their Extend-Embrace phase of take-over of Github.
One could argue that the purchase of Github was Extend, and their involvement with OpenAI, the Codex, and the potentially illegal use of OSS (subject to the legal investigations) is Embrace.
It's my own personal view that Microsoft held-back the progress of software development by probably a decade or so with their shady commingling with academia, blatant crippling of C# .NET to sell Visual Studio, and endlessly so forth. So I am, along with many, upset to see a business like this EEE their way into OSS, something which is dear and special to so many.
In the end, and I must state in my own opinion (since there is an element of speculation here), I am just pleased that there are still people out there who are not letting Microsoft continue their old ways.
If this is MS trying to pull off EEE, what does the extinguish phase look like? That they try to make it so that any codebase the uses copilot is owned by them, and that there's no way to turn it off because all other editors or code hosting sites will exist? Plausible I suppose if they play the game for several decades and somehow no one else produces any innovation in the space.
Extinguish might look like Microsoft or their customers/partners writing proprietary replacements for open source products with the help of copilot. I don't know how likely this is, but what co-pilot provides is a plausible path for leveraging open source code to create closed-source products. Over time this allows the proprietary software industry to contribute back less code while still benefitting enormously.
That would mean that Co-pilot is, or at least in big part, a front, a false flag operation to test the legal system's tolerance of what they are doing, to determine whether they can get away with what they are doing, right?
I'm not too sure yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if we wake up one day, and just like how it went with Facebook buying oculus, we will all of a sudden require some "microsoft account" to log into Github. Then more layers, and more, until there is nothing left.
Either that, or you wake up one day to see that Microsoft have stole your open source software and Microsoft says "but muh AI".
It's a new approach compared to Amazon taking open-source code and building AWS services that kill off attempts at self-funding (dual licensing/support services) by the people who made it. I hope it's not as successful. Amazon at least abided by the letter of the licenses.
>> "I'm not too sure yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if we wake up one day, and just like how it went with Facebook buying oculus, we will all of a sudden require some "microsoft account" to log into Github."
See: Minecraft. It was already a goldmine when they bought it, but they built it into an even bigger one before forcing millions to have a foot into their ecosystem. Copilot might be their way of making everyone dependent on GitHub before "moving on" from git and offering a Community Edition of their own source control system.
After that, what are you left with? A small enough proportion of developers, and Microsoft evidently thinks so, who don't know, and/or don't care, and/or don't have the time to fight their Extend-Embrace phase of take-over of Github.
One could argue that the purchase of Github was Extend, and their involvement with OpenAI, the Codex, and the potentially illegal use of OSS (subject to the legal investigations) is Embrace.
It's my own personal view that Microsoft held-back the progress of software development by probably a decade or so with their shady commingling with academia, blatant crippling of C# .NET to sell Visual Studio, and endlessly so forth. So I am, along with many, upset to see a business like this EEE their way into OSS, something which is dear and special to so many.
In the end, and I must state in my own opinion (since there is an element of speculation here), I am just pleased that there are still people out there who are not letting Microsoft continue their old ways.