Hello.
I'm asking the Fedora Legal team for a position on open source projects containing GitHub CoPilot AI generated code. We need to solve this problem for the electrum update[1].
I think this is not a problem for OSS projects, because even if CoPilot copy-pastes GPL-licensed fragments, the license will be GPL.
[1]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/electrum/pull-request/5
On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 2:08 AM Vitaly Zaitsev vitaly@easycoding.org wrote:
I'm asking the Fedora Legal team for a position on open source projects containing GitHub CoPilot AI generated code. We need to solve this problem for the electrum update[1].
It looks like the issue there is ChatGPT-generated code, not Copilot generated code. Short of an outright prohibition on packaging projects that are known to many *any* use of machine learning-generated content (which I think would be misguided), I am skeptical that Fedora can or should have a single position on all conceivable generative tools.
We'll take this request to be one for Fedora guidance on ChatGPT, not Copilot, but if I have misunderstood let me know.
Richard
On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 11:54 AM Richard Fontana rfontana@redhat.com wrote:
Short of an outright prohibition on packaging projects that are known to many *any* use of machine learning-generated content
*make, sorry.
Richard
On 11/03/2023 17:54, Richard Fontana wrote:
I am skeptical that Fedora can or should have a single position on all conceivable generative tools.
Any progress on this?
Can we push the Electrum update to Fedora or do we need to move it to the RPM Fusion?
On Wed, Apr 5, 2023 at 8:59 AM Vitaly Zaitsev vitaly@easycoding.org wrote:
On 11/03/2023 17:54, Richard Fontana wrote:
I am skeptical that Fedora can or should have a single position on all conceivable generative tools.
Any progress on this?
Can we push the Electrum update to Fedora or do we need to move it to the RPM Fusion?
Let me know if I have misunderstood something because there is very limited information in the referenced pull request.
As far as I can tell, this project announced on Twitter that it was using ChatGPT to help generate some code as some sort of publicity stunt.
We then have this: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum-http/commit/bde9d3b5fbf34623ca04c14eb6b... which if I understand correctly is a commit by the maintainer to add delimiters around the code that was supposedly generated by ChatGPT, in response to some community concerns I assume.
That code consists of the following trivial JavaScript function:
function formatTime(timeInSeconds) { var hours = Math.floor(timeInSeconds / 3600); var minutes = Math.floor((timeInSeconds - (hours * 3600)) / 60); var seconds = timeInSeconds - (hours * 3600) - (minutes * 60); if (hours < 10) { hours = "0" + hours; } if (minutes < 10) { minutes = "0" + minutes; } if (seconds < 10) { seconds = "0" + seconds; } return hours + ":" + minutes + ":" + seconds; }
If that's all that this is about, I don't think this by itself is a reason for Fedora to adopt a policy around upstream projects that claim or are suspected to use ChatGPT, nor does it seem to be a reason to raise some sort of Fedora-legal obstacle to pushing this update.
As such tools become more widely and extensively used and become much more sophisticated, we may have reason to revisit this issue.
Richard