Programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick has sued Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI, alleging that GitHub’s Copilot violates the terms of open-source licenses and infringes the rights of programmers.
GitHub Copilot, released in June 2022, is an AI-based programming aid that uses OpenAI Codex to generate real-time source code and function recommendations in Visual Studio. The tool was trained with machine learning using billions of lines of code from public repositories and can transform natural language into code snippets across dozens of programming languages.
There are lots of different open-source licenses, like the GPL, Apache, and MIT licenses, that require attribution of the author’s name and defining particular copyrights.
Microsoft, as a mostly proprietary software company (and one which uses others’ copyrighted code), should be fully aware of the conditions of use for open-source licensing. It is not just a free-for-all scenario. They also own GitHub and are very aware of the different types of open-source license provided for there. Copilot can still work, but it needed to factor in the different license types, and deal with them appropriately.
#technology #opensource #licensing #GitHub #Copilot