The rise of LLMs as a useful development tool over the last year or so has been significant. The power and flexibility of tools like Claude Code and ChatGPT have given a lot of functionality both to experienced developers and new developers alike. But there are trade-offs.
Doubt it. The incentives don’t align. They benefit from open source much more than are threatened by it. Even that “embrace, extent, extinguish” idea comes from different times and it’s likely less profitable than the vendor lock-in and other modern practices that are actually in place today. Even the copyright argument is something that could easily backfire if they just throw it in a case, because of all this questionable AI training.
And specially for Microsoft, they would be shooting their own foot if they were to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the development community over the legality of the use of AI tools like Copilot, which they themselves promote and sell.