Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?

Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by jodrellblank on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:51AM (#31848329)

> "Moreover, open source developers are already suffering burnouts because of gigantic multi-billion dollar corporations taking their free code and re-bundling it as a SaaS, hence, introducing this new feature takes even more from them than there was before."

The popular open source licenses explicitly give permission for people to resell your work, it's not even buried in the small print or anything. e.g.

GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)".

MIT License: "including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software".

Apache License: "each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work".

This should no more cause burnout than someone buying your old car and using it for an endurance race makes you tired. Where there's burnout involved it's more likely the demands for support and fixes that head back upstream without any associated money. More concerning is Copilot trained on code which isn't GPL licensed or similar. Sharing code doesn't automatically grant anyone any license to use it for anything at all.

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by Longlius on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:21AM (#31848707)

Except in the case of the GPL license, your rights to reuse and redistribute the source code are contingent upon your derived work also being licensed under the GPL. This is not a hypothetical untested legalese requirement but a real legal requirement that's held up in the courts of several countries.

So yes, using a substantial portion of GPL code in your proprietary software product is copyright infringement. Or even using a substantial portion of GPL code and not licensing the code under an appropriate license - https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by blueflow on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:55AM (#31848388)

From MIT License;

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

I'm not confident Copilot will comply with this part of my code's license.

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by simonw on Thursday June 23, 2022 @08:58AM (#31848410)

It depends on the interpretation of "substantial portions". Classic challenge with legal documents.

Here's a discussion about that usage in the MIT license: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2188

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by jodrellblank on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:13AM (#31848612)

Me either, but that has little to do with burnout from other people making money from GPL licensed code.

(That a tool exists doesn't free one from responsibility for using it; CoPilot not citing original code and its license terms seems like it rules it out for anything beyond experimentation; that part is very arguable)

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by c01n on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:04AM (#31848484)

> GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)".

Yes but if I use copilot in a private codebase how sure am I that it has not copied GPL code.

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Re:Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code? by 8organicbits on Thursday June 23, 2022 @09:23AM (#31848729)

I think the risk is higher, but it's always been possible one of the developers would copy GPL code. There are tools that check your code to see if any GPL code exists. I haven't used them, but I suppose you could audit with those.

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