> They've since admitted this was a mistake

Don't anthropomorphize organizations. It was no longer beneficial for them to openly fight open source so instead the people in charge decided they needed to get developer mindshare by changing their public signaling. The sad thing is many people fell for it. They can just as easily switch back at any time when it becomes beneficial.

BTW, the phrasing "Microsoft has embraced open source" is very ironic and given my previous paragraph, it is a nice foreshadowing or what can come next at any time.

> Are you claiming Microsoft/GitHub used or sold private source code for training LLMs?

I have not seen it denied in any official communication. After skimming this question[0], nobody else could either and the phrasing in their FAQ is oddly specific about Business and Enterprise. So yes, given their patterns of behavior, it's very likely and I will consider it true until proven otherwise.

But that's not the biggest issue. That is that every LLM or LLM-adjacent company (Microsoft included) seems to suddenly argue that a mechanical transformation of input data is enough to erase licensing and attribution.[1] Free software licenses like GPL simple cannot exist in this environment. In fact, any licenses would have exactly 0 meaning.

See a program you want with a license you don't want? Just run it through a sufficiently complex black box and out the other side you have an identically behaving program which according to big-tech has no relation to the input. You can even do this with closed source software if you run it through a decompiler first.

I recall a MS CEO shouting something about developers when developers were the thing they needed most. Now they can train NNs on the devs' own work to imitate and replace the devs so devs are no longer valuable and get thrown under the bus.

Oh and MS employees are apparently forced to use LLMs by management...

[0]: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/135400

[1]: This is a convenient 180° turn after for example people who had ever seen windows source code could not contribute to wine.