FSF-funded call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
On its blog, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) hasannounceda call for white papers about GitHubCopilot and the questions surroundingit. The FSF will pay $500 for papers that it publishes because they"help elucidate the problem":
We can see that Copilot's use of freely licensed software has manyimplications for an incredibly large portion of the free softwarecommunity. Developers want to know whether training a neural network ontheir software can really be considered fair use. Others who may beinterested in using Copilot wonder if the code snippets and other elementscopied from GitHub-hosted repositories could result in copyrightinfringement. And even if everything might be legally copacetic, activistswonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietarysoftware company building a service off their work.