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by falcolas 1309 days ago
GitHub Copilot has been concretely demonstrated to emit significant chunks of OSS licensed code.

Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it.

EDIT:

> If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it.

Not from a copyright point of view. The rights to those lyrics belong to the songwriter. It's kinda like photographs. You don't automatically have the right to distribute a photograph of yourself that was taken by someone else.

1 comments

> Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it.

That "significant enough [...] to taint the entire codebase" remains to be decided in court.

> That "significant enough [...] to taint the entire codebase" remains to be decided in court.

I doubt any employer would appreciate being this particular guinea pig because one of their employees wanted to avoid writing some boilerplate.

Several of the byte-for-byte copies pointed out by open source authors were longer than 20 lines, and contained verbatim comments.

I am not a lawyer, but that's been enough to get people in legal trouble in the US.