Software Freedom Conservance (SFC), which provides legal protection to free projects and defends the need to comply with the GPL license, announced about the termination of any use of the platform for the joint development of the GitHub code and called on the developers of other open projects to follow their example. The organization also launched initiative , aimed at simplifying the migration of projects with GITHUB on more open alternatives, for example, codeberg (based on Gitea) and sourcehut , or the implementation of its own development services based on open platforms , such as gitea or gitlab community edition .
The organization of SFC was pushed to create the initiative by GitHub and Microsoft to understand ethical and legal subtleties to use the initial texts of free software as the basis for building a machine learning model for the Github Copilot commercial service. Representatives of SFC tried to figure out whether the created model of machine learning is an object of copyright and if so, then to whom these rights belong and how they correlate with the rights to the code on the basis of which the model is built. It is also not yet clear whether the code of the code can be considered the derivative of the GitHub Copilot block and the repeating code from the projects used to build, and whether the inclusion of such blocks in proprietary software as violation of the coplets of licenses can be considered.
Microsoft and GitHub questions about what legal norms formed the basis of the statements of the GITHUB director that training model of machine learning on publicly affordable data belongs to the category of conscientious use and processing of code in Github Copilot can be interpreted by analogy using compiler. Additionally, Microsoft asked to provide a list of licenses and a list of the names of repositories used in the training of the model.