STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS, PT2

SFC stops using Github for project hosting as it sees Microsoft and Github’s use of FOSS to train Copilot and not Windows code and then charge for it’s use as a violation of FOSS. Effectively stealing code and not providing attribution.

Copilot, based on OpenAI’s Codex, suggests code and functions to developers as they’re working. It’s able to do so because it was trained “on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub,” according to GitHub.

Gingerich and Kuhn see that as a problem because Microsoft and GitHub have failed to provide answers about the copyright ramifications of training its AI system on public code, about why Copilot was trained on FOSS code but not copyrighted Windows code, and whether the company can specify all the software licenses and copyright holders attached to code used in the training data set.

So code you ‘write’ using Copilot could very well fall foul of copyright and you probably wouldn’t know.

As much as I agree with the sentiment here, Github is too widely used as a free product for people to migrate away.