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Copilot has always seemed like a blatant GPL violation to me.



Code is not licensed to GitHub under the GPL. Your comment is word salad.


Care to explain in legal terms why this stance is qualified?


You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified it, and giving a relevant date. b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”. c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

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I don’t see how one could argue that training on GPL code is not “based on” GPL code.


So if a developer reads GPL code, learns, then writes new code later on, it infringes on that license?


A developer is a person. Copilot is software based on the GPL code. Just because you use the word “learn” does not make what a human does and software does the same thing.




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