Don’t most licenses require at least attribution? I don’t believe GitHub is restricting themselves to only licenses that don’t. In fact the only software licenses I can think of that don’t require attribution are 0BSD, WTFPL, CC0, MIT-0 and Unlicense, and they all aren’t super popular. Also in some countries creators have inalienable moral rights which can be enforced regardless of the license. For example in Germany it is impossible to relinquish certain rights you have as the creator of a work, including the right to attribution.

Does GitHub verify that the code that is in my repository is actually in accordance to the license that I’ve added? I could just upload any proprietary code with an incorrect license, and GitHub would just use that to feed their AI. Like any other dependency that you incorporate into your application, GitHub should verify/audit whether the license allows them to do so.

> If your code is using a license that allows it, how could you possibly opt-out aside from using a different license?

A repo setting that instructs Github not to use your code for Copilot, it could be a similar option as turning Discussions on / off.

If they really want to win developers over they would even have Copilot scanning disabled by default but that'll never happen.

I'm not sure using a different license actually opts you out. By merely hosting your code on GitHub you grant them the right to analyze your code on their servers[1]

They may be morally in the wrong, but I'm unsure they are legally in the wrong here. To boot, denying them the right to create this tool in your license is technically a violation of OSS principles and problematic

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Microsoft could provide an opt-out for projects or even contributors, regardless of licence.