Developments in the FOSS response to Copilot and related technologies

Back in July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for white papers to explore the issues around GitHub's Copilot AI-assisted programming tool, especially with regard to copyleft licensing; each selected white paper was awarded $500. The FSF has now published five of the submissions that the organization thought "advanced discussion of important questions, and did so clearly".

In our call for papers, we set forth several areas of interest. Most of these areas centered around copyright law, questions of ownership for AI-generated code, and legal impacts for GitHub authors who use a GNU or other copyleft license(s) for their works. We are pleased to announce the community-provided research into these areas, and much more.

First, we want to thank everyone who participated by sending in their papers. We received a healthy response of twenty-two papers from members of the community. The papers weighed-in on the multiple areas of interest we had indicated in our announcement. Using an anonymous review process, we concluded there were five papers that would be best suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to help guide our actions in the search for solutions.

One of the submissions published was from Policy Fellow at Software Freedom Conservancy, Bradley M. Kuhn; that organization has announced the formation of a committee to "develop recommendations and plans for a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community response to the use of machine learning tools for code generation and authorship". A public ai-assist mailing list has been set up for discussions. "The inaugural members of the Committee are: Matthew Garrett, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bradley M. Kuhn, Heiki Lohmus, Allison Randal, Karen M. Sandler, Slavina Stefanova, John Sullivan, David Novalis' Turner, and Stefano Zack' Zacchiroli."