The lengthy June 30 post lists three GitHub Copilot-related questions that SFC reportedly asked Microsoft (which owns GitHub), to which it has not received answers for a year and which Microsoft has allegedly formally refused to answer: It promised to provide resources to support any member projects that choose to migrate and help however else it can. SFC said it won't mandate that its existing member projects move off the platform at this time, but it won't accept new member projects that do not have a long-term plan to migrate away from GitHub. In addition to the legal issues, the ethical implications of GitHub's choice to use copylefted code in the service of creating proprietary software are grave. Their only defense of these actions was a tweet by their former CEO, in which he falsely claims that unsettled law on this topic is actually settled. Microsoft and GitHub have been ignoring these license requirements for more than a year. These licenses have requirements including proper author attribution and, in the case of copyleft licenses, they sometimes require that works based on and/or that incorporate the software be licensed under the same copyleft license as the prior work. Most of those projects are not in the "public domain", they are licensed under FOSS licenses. The AI model was trained ( according to GitHub's own statements) exclusively with projects that were hosted on GitHub, including many licensed under copyleft licenses. On that list, GitHub Copilot complaints get top billing:Ĭopilot is a for-profit product - developed and marketed by Microsoft and their GitHub subsidiary - that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to automatically generate code interactively for developers. What's more: "We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub."Īs far as that long list of grievances, the group has set up a dedicated site to feature them and other justifications for leaving GitHub, appropriately titled " Give Up GitHub!" "Launching a for-profit product that disrespects the FOSS community in the way Copilot does simply makes the weight of GitHub's bad behavior too much to bear," SFC said in the post. In a June 30 blog post, SFC listed many grievances about GitHub's behavior, especially pertaining to the release of a paid service based on GitHub Copilot, whose AI model is trained on top-quality GitHub source code repos. Like the FSF, the group is a strong advocate of strict free and open source software (FOSS). Now, another open source-focused organization, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), has piled on. Yet it has also sparked negative backlash arising from legal, ethical,security and other concerns, especially from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which last year deemed GitHub Copilot to be " unacceptable and unjust." GitHub Copilot in Animated Action (source: GitHub).
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