On its blog, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has
announced
a call for white papers about GitHub
Copilot and the questions surrounding
it. The FSF will pay $500 for papers that it publishes because they
“help elucidate the problem“:
We can see that Copilot’s use of freely licensed software has many
implications for an incredibly large portion of the free software
community. Developers want to know whether training a neural network on
their software can really be considered fair use. Others who may be
interested in using Copilot wonder if the code snippets and other elements
copied from GitHub-hosted repositories could result in copyright
infringement. And even if everything might be legally copacetic, activists
wonder if there isn’t something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary
software company building a service off their work.