What is Copilot Chat but a front end to some Microsoft SaaS offering? There's nothing materially "open source" about that. All the important stuff is locked up behind the GitHub Copilot API. No one can customize the LLM design or training material. It certainly can't be self-hosted. This is just in-app advertising for yet another subscription service that sends your personal data to an amoral third party. There's no community, no public benefit, no commonwealth.
mirekrusin · 35m ago
There are just two forms of code - public domain and private. It's just that some people don't see it yet.
hu3 · 1h ago
Quick, someone use AI to scan the codebase and explain the decision tree of Copilot Chat with regards how it handle prompts and responses.
BrentOzar · 43m ago
I have a hard time getting excited about this when they have such an atrocious record of handling pull requests in VS Code already: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls
msgodel · 15m ago
It looks to me like they close nearly 30 PRs every day. That's kind of amazing.
I'm no fan of Microsoft but that's a massive maintenance burden. They must have multiple people working on this full time.
Alupis · 38m ago
That's because it's Microsoft's Trademarked version of Open Source.
All the good FOSS vibes, without any of the hard FOSS work...
NewsaHackO · 14m ago
I hate this analogy. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean it is forced to commit or comment on every pull request which takes development time. If that notion really bothers you, you are free to fork VSCode and close all 600 pull requests on your fork.
Alupis · 2m ago
It's a common theme across most (all?) Microsoft "Open Source" repos. They publish the codebase on Github (which implies a certain thing on it's own), but accept very little community input/contributions - if any.
These repo's will usually have half a dozen or more Microsoft Employees with "Project Manager" titles and the like - extremely "top heavy". All development, decision making, roadmap and more are done behind closed doors. PR's go dormant for months of years... Issues get some sort of cursory "thanks for the input" response from a PM... then crickets.
I'm not arguing all open source needs to be a community and accept contributions. But let's be honest - this is deliberate on Microsoft's part. They want the "good vibes" of being open source friendly - but corporate Microsoft still isn't ready to embrace open source. ie, it's fake open source.
tomnipotent · 12m ago
I'm not sure I see the problem. The number of merged PR's looks on the high side for a FOSS project.
I'm no fan of Microsoft but that's a massive maintenance burden. They must have multiple people working on this full time.
All the good FOSS vibes, without any of the hard FOSS work...
These repo's will usually have half a dozen or more Microsoft Employees with "Project Manager" titles and the like - extremely "top heavy". All development, decision making, roadmap and more are done behind closed doors. PR's go dormant for months of years... Issues get some sort of cursory "thanks for the input" response from a PM... then crickets.
I'm not arguing all open source needs to be a community and accept contributions. But let's be honest - this is deliberate on Microsoft's part. They want the "good vibes" of being open source friendly - but corporate Microsoft still isn't ready to embrace open source. ie, it's fake open source.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclo...