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There actually _is_ a good argument in there, but the article is really poorly written and all the preamble about SourceForge ends up being a distraction from what you really need to stop and think about:

FOSS projects like the Linux kernel use the GPL license because the developers want their code to be free not just for themselves, but for everyone everywhere for all time. It's not acceptable terms for you to take their work and use it to build an alternate operating system that you aren't going to share. If this wasn't important to them they could have just published their code under MIT/BSD licenses.

If you were to build an AI that used the Linux source code to generate a "new" closed-source operating system, in a very real sense all you've done is invent a new way to plagiarize the Linux community's work so that you can weasel your way out of their license terms. Even if you got away with this in the courts, it's obviously very unethical.

What Copilot does is enable the mass plagiarizing of open source code from everyone all at once, mixed up together so that it's hard to know who the original authors were, and then pretend that somehow this makes it ethical.



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