Microsoft releases GitHub co-pilot: AI ethical challenge

It’s brilliant: Microsoft releases GitHub co-pilot which is trained on open source code on Github.

Hurray! Developer productivity may increase occasionally.

Hold on second, have you checked licenses on those repositories you used for training?

As MS is an open-source contributor it probably knows about open source licenses, their differences and that a lot of them have a “**derivative work” **clause — that any code derived from the work shall also be open-sourced and attributed accordingly.

There is no legal precedence or practice regarding this and I don’t believe MS FAQ on “fair use” of open data will hold the water if challenge.

I would argue that since MS used code with GPL type of licenses to train the Co-Pilot algorithm it shall release the Co-pilot model in its entirety.

See this and this discussion.