A sizable, possibly plurality cohort of fully adult tech people is young enough to not know about United States v. Microsoft Corp. This would explain a lot of comments I see on this topic.

If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Copilot was Microsoft's first test of people's trust after the GitHub acquisition. It's going very, very, very poorly. There were ways to do this with consent and collaboration with the people and projects it takes code from, but they're acting like classic Microsoft here.

Too many people are focused on what's legal. It's fine to think of, but law is the last stop before the breakdown of society. Microsoft skipped society and went straight to sparking an inevitable test of and possible reshaping of copyright law.

Or maybe they do know about it, and don't agree with you. Do you allow for such an option?

https://github.com/features/copilot

"What can I do to reduce GitHub Copilot’s suggestion of code that matches public code?

We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare instances where a GitHub Copilot suggestion contains code that matches public code on GitHub. You have the choice to turn that filter on or off during setup. With the filter on, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with its surrounding code for matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace) against public code on GitHub of about 150 characters. If there is a match, the suggestion will not be shown to you. We plan on continuing to evolve this approach and welcome feedback and comment."