GitHub Copilot uses models trained on non-permissively licensed code (and perhaps even private user code), and is being sued over this exact practice. This is why GitHub Copilot should be scary, especially to enterprises. In which case, who is responsible for this clear legal infringement? The developer of the LLM or the user who unknowingly ends up accepting the LLM’s suggestions and committing the code to their team’s codebase? Honestly, there is no clear answer, but that’s the scary part - no user or company should be subject to legal action, even potentially, just for using an AI code assistant tool. The argument to not do so is perhaps less clear - researchers say LLMs rarely spit out training data verbatim unless interacted with adversarially, but theoretically, they could. Clearly a developer copy-pasting GPL code without consent is bad and grounds for legal action, but what about a generative code model? Is it wrong for such a model to “learn” from this data? The argument to do so is clear - GPL-licensed OSS is some of the highest quality code that is publicly available, and just like any machine learning model, better quality training data almost always means better quality LLMs. There are legal ramifications with a company’s developers violating GPL licenses, independent of intent.īut things have been muddled thanks to generative AI and LLMs. There are a bunch of reasons why an OSS maintainer would choose non permissive over permissive or vice versa, but that’s not the point - this is simply what the law is. MIT, BSD, Apache) means you actually can legally use that code for whatever, including commercial reasons, but non-permissive licenses such as GPL mean that you cannot without consent. OSS licenses define acceptable use of the particular library - permissive licenses (ex. But just because some code is public does not automatically mean it can be used for commercial purposes without permission.
To start, what is GPL (General Public License)? By definition, open source software (OSS) is, well, open. GPL, non-permissive code, and how they relate to AI-powered code assistants TL DR GitHub Copilot trains on GPL code and its nonpermissive filters don’t actually work, while we at Codeium have removed GPL licensed code from our training data, guaranteeing peace of mind to our users.
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