The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which provides legal protection for free projects and advocates compliance with the GPL, has announced that it will stop all use of the GitHub code collaboration platform and urged developers of other open source projects to follow suit. The organization has also launched an initiative to make it easier to migrate projects from GitHub to more open alternatives such as CodeBerg (powered by Gitea) and SourceHut, or to host their own development services based on open platforms such as Gitea or GitLab Community Edition on their servers.
The SFC was inspired by the reluctance of GitHub and Microsoft to understand the ethical and legal intricacies of using free software source code as the basis for building a machine learning model in the commercial GitHub Copilot service. Representatives of the SFC tried to figure out whether the created machine learning model is copyrighted and, if so, who owns these rights and how they relate to the rights to the code on which the model is built. It is also not yet clear whether a block of code generated in GitHub Copilot and repeating the code from the projects used to build the model can be considered a derivative work, and whether the inclusion of such blocks in proprietary software can be considered a violation of copyleft licenses.
Microsoft and GitHub representatives were asked what legal norms formed the basis of the statements of the director of GitHub that training a machine learning model on publicly available data is in the category of fair use and code processing in GitHub Copilot can be interpreted by analogy with using a compiler. Additionally, Microsoft was asked to provide a list of licenses and a list of repositories used in training the model.
Also, a question was asked about how the statement that it is permissible to train a model on any code without regard to the licenses used is correlated with the fact that only open source code was used for training GitHub Copilot and training does not cover the code of closed repositories and proprietary products of the company, such as like Windows and MS Office. If training a model on any code is fair use, then why does Microsoft value its intellectual property over the intellectual property of open source developers?
Microsoft has been evasive and has not provided legal analysis to support the legitimacy of its fair use claims. Attempts to obtain the necessary information have been made since July last year. Initially, representatives from Microsoft and GitHub promised to respond soon, but never did. Six months later, a public discussion of potential legal and ethical issues in machine learning systems was initiated, but Microsoft representatives ignored the invitation to participate in it. Ultimately, a year later, Microsoft representatives directly refused to discuss this issue, explaining that the discussion was pointless, since it was unlikely to change the position of the SFC.
In addition to the complaints related to the GitHub Copilot project, the following GitHub issues have also been reported:
- GitHub has been contracted to provide commercial services to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), whose activities are considered unethical by activists, for example, because of the practice of separating children and their parents after the detention of illegal immigrants. Attempts to discuss the issue of cooperation between GitHub and ICE ran into a dismissive and hypocritical attitude towards the issue.
- GitHub assures the community of its open source support, but the site and the entire GitHub service are proprietary, and the codebase is closed and not available for analysis. Although the Git toolkit was designed to replace the proprietary BitKeeper and move away from centralization in favor of a distributed development model, GitHub, through the provision of specific Git add-ons, ties developers to a centralized proprietary site controlled by a single commercial company.
- GitHub executives are critical of copyleft and the GPL, advocating the use of permissive licenses. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which has previously shown itself to be attacking open source software and taking action against the copyleft licensing model.
Additionally, it is noted that the SFC organization has suspended accepting new projects that do not plan to migrate from GitHub. Projects that are already part of the SFC are not forced to leave GitHub, but the organization is ready to provide them with all the necessary resources and support if they intend to move to another platform. In addition to advocacy, the SFC organization is engaged in the accumulation of sponsorship funds and the provision of legal protection to free projects, taking on the functions of collecting donations and managing project assets, which relieves developers of personal liability in the event of litigation. SFC-supported projects include Git, CoreBoot, Wine, Samba, OpenWrt, QEMU, Mercurial, BusyBox, Inkscape, and about a dozen other free projects.
Source: opennet.ru