In July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for whitepapers about the “philosophical and legal questions” around GitHub’s Copilot.

I wanted to write one, but decided not to until encouraged to do so by an employee of the FSF. By that time, I only had five days to write it, so the paper ended being subpar, but I got it in.

As to be expected, my paper was not chosen for publication, and I don’t blame them. However, I thought I would publish it myself.

Here it is. It is licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

This paper has not been peer- or lawyer-reviewed. And I am not a lawyer.

I also wrote about Copilot before and mentioned licenses to poison the well for machine learning. That work is still ongoing. I just need to budget for the amount that it will cost to have a lawyer review and fix the licenses.

Do NOT use any of those licenses until that work has been done. I will announce the completion when it happens.

Until then, I welcome feedback.