The people protesting aren't a "vocal few"; We're the people who made copilot possible. We are frustrated that our work is being used to profit a massive corporation without any compensation and in a way that we at best did not intend to allow and at worst is in direct violation of the terms we set.
Nah, you're definitely the few. Its not a random sample, but an informal survey of my coworkers found no one who would care and generally positive sentiment.
The people who comment on something are disproportionately those who care a great deal.
My point was not that those critical of CoPilot are in a majority, it is that our perspective is important because our labour is what makes copilot possible.
What proportion of its capability is derived from the labor of people who don't like it? I get your point about feeling like an unwilling contributor while github/MS harvests revenue from people who like it. But there's an implication here of being in a critical majority, which I am not convinced is the case.
Perhaps a good compromise is to make it opt-out, if it’s not already. Though even this is just pandering to the developer’s ego. AI writing code is a massive boost in giving users power and thus freedom. Of course, we need to make AI itself FOSS, but I doubt a legal case could be made for that. A more productive path is to clone the model like SD did with Dall-e.
