Hi
The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built using a corpus of software hosted on github.
And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ?
I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This presents two interesting questions - is the model (which is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material) a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered fair use ?
If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated, and while individual pieces might not be large, there are many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being creative is something only a human/real intelligence can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an "autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing music, then they could expect legal action from record labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise" but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ?
But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between countries...
But assuming a no to those two points, github would then (I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site which state that by uploading code to its site, you give it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source products, apparently ?
Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github that then implies that you (and maybe github) have contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is probably not what you intended ?
Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until the legalities have been settled ?
regards
marc
Hey,
while I can't answer your questions, here is an article by Julie Reda, arguing that Copilot is not in fact infringing copyright and that the copyleft movement would not benefit from stricter copyright rules:
https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright...
Regarding your question about music, there is an interesting provocative project:
Fairuseify.ml uses a neural network to "learn" music that you upload to it. You can then download what the network "learned" (which in my experiments pretty much sounds like what you uploaded).
I'll watch this debate closely.
Paul
Am 10.07.21 um 10:58 schrieb marc:
Hi
The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built using a corpus of software hosted on github.
And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ?
I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This presents two interesting questions - is the model (which is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material) a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered fair use ?
If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated, and while individual pieces might not be large, there are many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being creative is something only a human/real intelligence can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an "autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing music, then they could expect legal action from record labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise" but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ?
But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between countries...
But assuming a no to those two points, github would then (I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site which state that by uploading code to its site, you give it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source products, apparently ?
Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github that then implies that you (and maybe github) have contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is probably not what you intended ?
Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until the legalities have been settled ?
regards
marc _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
Also I experience something similar of CoPilot for the Mozilla Italia DeepSpeech Italian model (https://github.com/MozillaItalia/DeepSpeech-Italian-Model).
When I studied how to deal with various audio+text/text-only italian datasets I talked a bit with other people of the Machine Learning community and also with some lawyers. It is a grey area because the focus is that you are generating a model that don't let you to recreate the (in our case) original materials and also doesn't store (in some cases) the real trained content but just numbers.
So for the audio+text dataset we chosen to use only dataset with licenses that are CC or public domain (very few as a lot of them are academic and don't use license at all), instead for text-only we used various sources also with no licenses. This because we are aggregating all the sources together, removing duplicates, symbols and other stuff so it is not possible to recreate the original material. The model generated is released as CC0 and mention all the dataset used and for the text-only it is the same, also we release all the scripts to generate it but we don't release the files created during the parsing but just the final output.
Similar of what is doing the https://github.com/common-voice/cv-sentence-extractor that is using Wikipedia and Wikisource as source but they pick for every article just 3 sentences randomly. I know that for the project was involved the Mozilla Legal team and also if Wikipedia is CC0 they preferred that way.
The issue I see with CoPilot, but also with Kite or TabNine, that are all services for autocomplete or auto write code trained on open source code, is they can recreate part of the code but not all of that but the law doesn't mention the amount of that. As example in Italy is allowed to photocopy just the 20% of a book by the copyrights laws.
PS: the story of the italian project with a talk at fosdem 2020 https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/how_to_get_fun_with_teamwork/ or the written version https://daniele.tech/2019/12/how-the-italian-deepspeech-model-helped-our-moz...
Daniele Scasciafratte - OpenSource MultiVersal Guy daniele.tech https://daniele.tech - @Mte90Net https://twitter.com/Mte90net - GitHub https://github.com/Mte90 - Italian Linux Society council member http://www.ils.org/ - Mozillian https://people.mozilla.org/p/Mte90 Mozilla Reps, Mozilla TechSpeakers, WordPress Core Contributor https://profiles.wordpress.org/mte90, FSFE member https://fsfe.org/, LibreItalia member http://www.libreitalia.it/soci/, Wikimedia Italia member https://www.wikimedia.it/ and LUG Rieti founder http://lugrieti.linux.it/. Il 12/07/21 11:12, Paul Schaub ha scritto:
Hey,
while I can't answer your questions, here is an article by Julie Reda, arguing that Copilot is not in fact infringing copyright and that the copyleft movement would not benefit from stricter copyright rules:
https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright...
Regarding your question about music, there is an interesting provocative project:
Fairuseify.ml uses a neural network to "learn" music that you upload to it. You can then download what the network "learned" (which in my experiments pretty much sounds like what you uploaded).
I'll watch this debate closely.
Paul
Am 10.07.21 um 10:58 schrieb marc:
Hi
The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built using a corpus of software hosted on github.
And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ?
I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This presents two interesting questions - is the model (which is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material) a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered fair use ?
If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated, and while individual pieces might not be large, there are many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being creative is something only a human/real intelligence can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an "autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing music, then they could expect legal action from record labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise" but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ?
But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between countries...
But assuming a no to those two points, github would then (I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site which state that by uploading code to its site, you give it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source products, apparently ?
Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github that then implies that you (and maybe github) have contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is probably not what you intended ?
Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until the legalities have been settled ?
regards
marc _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
On Mon, 12 Jul 2021 11:12:51 +0200 Paul Schaub vanitasvitae@fsfe.org wrote:
Hey,
while I can't answer your questions, here is an article by Julie Reda, arguing that Copilot is not in fact infringing copyright and that the copyleft movement would not benefit from stricter copyright rules:
https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringing-your-copyright...
This. Every new law will eventually be used against you. It would be nice for GitHub to include an opt-out feature. Barring that, I would move off their platform.
Alex
Hi,
you've certainly raised some interesting and important questions, as well as some deep philosophical comments. Unfortunately they're (obviously) not all things I can help with; however, some clarifications might be useful:
* The corpus of software is not part of the copilot "software" as such; it is only ever used as data, which then gets processed and reprocessed. I'm pretty sure that means it never runs afoul of any version of the (A/L/)GPL.
The main scenario where those licenses are involved is if someone asks copilot for some code and then puts that in a proprietary program.
* There are most definitely sizeable chunks of output reproduced verbatim from elsewhere (notably the fast inverse square root function, comments and all). Whether or not any are sufficiently large to attract copyright is, as you say, the interesting question.
* Simply republishing large amounts of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement- every English-language book published in the last three decades shares a large portion of its vocabulary with any other! The question, really, is what the "chunks" that define code are.
* Copyright law does indeed differ quite a lot between countries, and you are right to think this could lead to different verdicts (that said, I'm not sure if it will; IANAL).
* GitHub's terms of service allow them to do a variety of things with user submissions only "as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time" (archival is allowed for some other purposes); it seems, depending on future developments, that there might be a case copilot is not covered by these criteria.
That said, I believe the (A/L/)GPL permit GitHub to do what they did anyway; this case might only apply to projects that make don't grant those rights separately under a license.
* It is arguably prudent to avoid hosting any code on GitHub, even perhaps after any legal issues are settled: https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html#GitHub
On 7/10/21 8:58 AM, marc wrote:
Hi
The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built using a corpus of software hosted on github.
And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ?
I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This presents two interesting questions - is the model (which is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material) a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered fair use ?
If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated, and while individual pieces might not be large, there are many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being creative is something only a human/real intelligence can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an "autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing music, then they could expect legal action from record labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise" but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ?
But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between countries...
But assuming a no to those two points, github would then (I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site which state that by uploading code to its site, you give it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source products, apparently ?
Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github that then implies that you (and maybe github) have contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is probably not what you intended ?
Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until the legalities have been settled ?
regards
marc _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
Hi, me again
So I am going to respond to multiple comments in one go:
I had a look at Julia Reda's post, and as far as I can make out, she only focuses on the fact that individual snippets are very short - but doesn't make any mention that inserting *lots* snippets algorithmically is *all* that copilot does...
In a way her position is understandable - I believe it is consistent with that of the pirate party - they are copyright minimalists, and would prefer a world with no copyright, as far as I can tell. But until IP lawyers call themselves TSOALGGM lawyers (that expands to "temporary stewards of a limited government granted monopoly" rather than "intellectual property") I am not sure if her view is representative of the current situation.
Another commenter said that the codebase used to generate the model is just somehow the "input" and not actually *in* model - but I am not sure the distinction is that clear. If I ROT13 a Metallica mp3, then there is an algorithmic transformation and new file is clearly different, but it is possible to recover the original. In the same way it could be argued that the copilot model encodes the input code in its weightings. I suppose there are some losses, but if I were to downsample and ROT13 a Metallica CD (I don't, I have decided not to like their music), I'd still be in trouble if I'd claim it as my own work, right ? And if I XOR it with a Rick Astley mp3, would that suddenly be fair use ?
Finally for more amusement value: A different conversation points out to me that I should have made my mail more click-baity: "Does copilot mean that microsoft has lost its license to distribute the linux kernel ?" I am still not sure - but maybe this bit of sensationalism makes is clearer what is at stake ?
regards
marc
I think that the point is mainly how much means a copyright issue to train a machine learning model that can recreate the original with a specific percentage of similarity bu chunks (and define what means a chunk for code). As example if GPL license says that you can use the 30% of code lines for usage to generate a model (I don't know a better lawyer term) I think that everything will be solved.
This is a new area for lawyers to discuss and also for OSI and we cannot do anything for that as it isn't covered and there are difference between countries a lot.
Honestly I think that the issue there is the GitHub behaviour that if also they are allowed to do something with the source the users upload there they are not releasing the list of repositories used or specified projects by license (if they are private or public too). Or just asked for permissions for it as it is splitting the dev community that are their customers after all. We cannot forget that we don't know if they used also repositories with no licenses that are the facto proprietary and this happens a lot on GitHub.
My personal notes about abandoning GitHub as protest. I have everything on GitHub since 2012 with like 46 repositories on my profile (not talking about the various organizations and forks) and is not easy to migrate to a different platform and change all the reference to those. Also there is the issues of the many forks that aren't on GitHub so is not possible to contribute. So I think that the only way is forcing GitHub to do something, like specify more clearly what they are doing and how.
FSFE and maybe also FSF can think on creating a campaign to asks to GitHub to do that changes.
Daniele Scasciafratte - OpenSource MultiVersal Guy daniele.tech https://daniele.tech - @Mte90Net https://twitter.com/Mte90net - GitHub https://github.com/Mte90 - Italian Linux Society council member http://www.ils.org/ - Mozillian https://people.mozilla.org/p/Mte90 Mozilla Reps, Mozilla TechSpeakers, WordPress Core Contributor https://profiles.wordpress.org/mte90, FSFE member https://fsfe.org/, LibreItalia member http://www.libreitalia.it/soci/, Wikimedia Italia member https://www.wikimedia.it/ and LUG Rieti founder http://lugrieti.linux.it/. Il 12/07/21 23:16, marc ha scritto:
If I ROT13 a Metallica mp3, then there is an algorithmic transformation and new file is clearly different, but it is possible to recover the original. In the same way it could be argued that the copilot model encodes the input code in its weightings. I suppose there are some losses,
On 7/12/21 9:16 PM, marc wrote:
Hi, me again
So I am going to respond to multiple comments in one go:
I had a look at Julia Reda's post, and as far as I can make out, she only focuses on the fact that individual snippets are very short - but doesn't make any mention that inserting *lots* snippets algorithmically is *all* that copilot does...
Repermutating lots of snippets is not in itself copyright infringement, however- otherwise everything written in English would infringe on the copyright of dictionary publishers! That's not to say what copilot produces isn't a derivative work; you give a good argument to support the contrary. It just fails to follow straightforwardly from the fact that copilot produces "remixes" of existing code.
Another commenter said that the codebase used to generate the model is just somehow the "input" and not actually *in* model - but I am not sure the distinction is that clear.
You would be correct to wonder- if you're referring to my comment, I apologize for what was a warped and unclear explanation of a warped and unclear point. The intended argument was that copilot never executes or distributes compiled copies of the input (or the model derived from it) as *software* or part of any software, and therefore does not trigger the requirement of sharing under the (A/L/)GPL.
However, after further consideration, the requirement to include a license notice would pose a problem- and more generally, omitting or erring on the license notices of copilot's output could become a nightmare.
On Monday, 12 July 2021 23:16:22 CEST marc wrote:
Hi, me again
So I am going to respond to multiple comments in one go:
I had a look at Julia Reda's post, and as far as I can make out, she only focuses on the fact that individual snippets are very short - but doesn't make any mention that inserting *lots* snippets algorithmically is *all* that copilot does...
I imagine that the thinking at GitHub here is that if anyone's code is copied verbatim into something else, those people won't be able to assert their copyright based on some kind of "lack of standing", even if a lot of other people's code is also copied into the final work. Given that this kind of defense worked for actual, substantial, alleged infringement of the Linux kernel code by VMware, as opposed to chaotic copy-pasting of code fragments, I can easily see Microsoft's lawyers feeling confident that GitHub can get away with this, especially if combined with wide-eyed "it's an artificial intelligence" nonsense.
(I really wish people would stop referring to the application of supposed artificial intelligence techniques as *an* artificial intelligence, especially since beyond the breathless hype, few of those people are likely to be bothered with any of the broader ethical considerations at stake, particularly when applications of artificial intelligence do become sophisticated enough to merit concern about matters like the autonomy of such systems themselves.)
In a way her position is understandable - I believe it is consistent with that of the pirate party - they are copyright minimalists, and would prefer a world with no copyright, as far as I can tell. But until IP lawyers call themselves TSOALGGM lawyers (that expands to "temporary stewards of a limited government granted monopoly" rather than "intellectual property") I am not sure if her view is representative of the current situation.
One might agree with her assertion that stronger and more severe copyright laws are not necessarily helpful for Free Software, copyleft in particular, given that copyleft is effectively meant to subvert the copyright regime to promote the fair sharing of software. I also have to say that this thread is the first I've heard of this matter, and since I follow the FSF's announcements (and controversies) fairly actively, I wonder which "copyleft scene" she is referring to. Maybe a bunch of people who have shovelled their code onto GitHub because it was the popular thing to do, plus a bunch of people on proprietary "social media" platforms?
Another commenter said that the codebase used to generate the model is just somehow the "input" and not actually *in* model - but I am not sure the distinction is that clear. If I ROT13 a Metallica mp3, then there is an algorithmic transformation and new file is clearly different, but it is possible to recover the original. In the same way it could be argued that the copilot model encodes the input code in its weightings. I suppose there are some losses, but if I were to downsample and ROT13 a Metallica CD (I don't, I have decided not to like their music), I'd still be in trouble if I'd claim it as my own work, right ? And if I XOR it with a Rick Astley mp3, would that suddenly be fair use ?
There are quite a few things in the commentary that other commentators have surely picked apart already, but even skimming the text provides quite a few eyebrow-raising moments. For instance, the revelation that merely reading a book does not infringe copyright might be worth repeating to, say, the music industry, but what copyright is all about is indicated by its name. And traditionally, copying information does not tend to include "copying" it into one's brain via the visual system and other cognitive processes.
However, it is easy to see the top of the slippery slope at this point. What if the software is "an artificial intelligence" (sigh) that is merely being trained. It is then easy to imagine that companies might want to have things both ways (as they do now, but that is another matter): their artificial minion does all the work and isn't infringing anyone's copyright, but the company gets to copyright the output. At the same time, they can plead that it is just a machine and, unlike a human, cannot knowingly plagiarise other people's works.
Another thing that stood out was this: "The output of a machine simply does not qualify for copyright protection – it is in the public domain." Although I recognise that within a specific context, it might be true, it certainly is not unquestionably true beyond that context. A compiler takes source code and produces object code, but that object code is not in the public domain. Having spent the last few months indulging my nostalgia and reading old computing publications, I am reminded of the outrage back in the 1980s when one company produced a compiler for a microcomputer and then claimed that the output was, at least in part, based on their original work:
"Softek compiler payments dispute" https://archive.org/details/popular-computing-weekly-1983-05-26/mode/1up
Even if "computed" output is not subject to copyright, various inputs will be, and as the output is a translation of some input, it may also be, too. In the Free Software movement, people are fairly careful about such precedents for good reasons. I say good luck to anyone wanting to test their legal theories by, let us say, publishing a machine-translated version of one of the Harry Potter books.
Finally for more amusement value: A different conversation points out to me that I should have made my mail more click-baity: "Does copilot mean that microsoft has lost its license to distribute the linux kernel ?" I am still not sure - but maybe this bit of sensationalism makes is clearer what is at stake ?
One might argue that if the tool reproduces code fragments that are big enough to be considered candidates for copyright infringement, since they are source code fragments then the only obligation is to ensure that copyright and licensing information is also provided to the user of the tool. That possibly gets GitHub off the hook, but it then leaves the user of the tool to figure out what the status of the resulting work might be. Maybe it should also be generating a REUSE manifest to help that poor end-user.
Paul
Maybe future versions of GPL could cover this with an extended copyleft clause. I think it would be justified that software like copilot (including their datasets) also get GPL'd if they build on top of GPL source-code.
br. Michael
On 10.07.21 10:58, marc wrote:
Hi
The way I understand this (I welcome corrections), is that copilot is a piece of proprietary software which was built using a corpus of software hosted on github.
And if I understand it properly, this corpus of software includes code nominally released under the GPL and similar licenses. Is my understanding correct sofar ? alsoalsoalso I am told that copilot reproduces verbatim identifiable chunks of the code that was loaded into its model. This presents two interesting questions - is the model (which is an algorithmic transformation of copyrighted material) a new, rather than derivative work ? Are the fragments of code reproduced by it sufficiently small to be considered fair use ?
If I had to guess, I would answer no to both of these questions: The pasting in is verbatim and automated, and while individual pieces might not be large, there are many. Fundamentally, I also would like to think that being creative is something only a human/real intelligence can be, otherwise the guy who wrote a program to enumerate all melodies shorter than N would be owed sampling fees on all new music... and few notes of music require a royalty then a snippet of code might too ? If somebody writes an "autocompose" equivalent to copilot, trained on existing music, then they could expect legal action from record labels ? And not only for the output of the "autoimprovise" but also the model that forms the core of "autoplay" ?
But I am not qualified to provide a final answer on that - I suppose judges will be the ones to make that determination. Note the plural there - I am told fair use and its equivalents differ nontrivially between countries...
But assuming a no to those two points, github would then (I think) rely on the terms and conditions on its site which state that by uploading code to its site, you give it the license to re-use your work, even in closed-source products, apparently ?
Now: If you upload somebody else's GPLed code to github that then implies that you (and maybe github) have contravened the license, right ? And possibly that means you lose your own permission to hold a copy of the GPLed code ? Alternatively, if you are the legitimate owner of the code, you have just dual licensed your code (with a commercial grant to github, owned by microsoft) which is probably not what you intended ?
Note the question marks everywhere - have I gotten my facts wrong ? Is my reasoning incorrect ? Would it be prudent to avoid using github for (A/L/)GPLed code until the legalities have been settled ?
regards
marc _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct