

“You can literally find a piece of code you want, under an incompatible license, then keep probing copilot until it reproduces it. “Illegal source code laundering, automated by GitHub,” claimed Jeremy Soller, principal engineer at System 76, home of the pop!_os Linux distribution. Another concern is that developers may inadvertently combine code with incompatible licenses into one project. One of the concerns in the open source community is that if chunks of open source code are regurgitated wholesale, without specifying any license, then it is breaking the purpose of the license. Open source does not mean non-copyright though, and there are many different open source licenses, each of which conveys different permissions.

It is important to note that the original code in question is itself open source and on GitHub under the LGPL 2.1 license. Developer Tim Davis posted this image on Twitter, showing his comment in Visual Studio Code, his original code from another project below, and the Copilot suggestion on the right. Another developer using Copilot was able to get similar results. In other words, Github Copilot analizes your code of your entire project and creates suggestions to automatically create new code.įor instance, you can write a comment like this : // Write a function that takes a string and returns a new string with all vowels removed.Davis also eliminated the possibility that Copilot was only offering the code because he wrote it. It is based on the idea that you can write code in a more efficient way by using the same code that you have written before. In practice, it is a tool that help you to write code by showing suggestions. It works thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning and it is based on OpenAI. To briefly explain what is Github Copilot, it is a tool that, as its name says, help you write code. You are maybe already using it in a personal project or a professional project. If you are reading this post, you have probably already heard of Github Copilot.
