David Spring M. Ed. March 15 2023

GitHub is the world’s largest open source code repository -hosting the code of millions of open source developers. In 2018, Microsoft shocked the open source community by purchasing GitHub for $7.5 billion. Shortly after purchasing GitHub, Microsoft began secretly using the open source code written by the open source development community to produce a closed source program called Copilot. Copilot magically strips the code of its open source license and then resells the code without the open source license or any attributional credit to the original authors of the code. In short, Microsoft uses a Magic Wand to steal billions of lines of open source code from millions of open source developers and turn their code into closed source code sold for a profit.

This is possibly the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. Imagine spending a year writing a 300 page book and then finding entire chapters of your book copied word for word into a book that Microsoft was selling – with no link back to your original book and no mention of who wrote the chapter. Now imagine that you had an open source license at the beginning of your book allowing any one to copy your book requiring that they must include your name and the open source license at the beginning of their book. With Copilot, Microsoft has stolen the contents of millions of books while at the same time using a Magic Wand to strip each book of its open source license and delete the names of the original authors.

In November 2022, a group of open source developers filed a 56 page class action lawsuit in California federal court asking for potentially billions of dollars in damages due to Microsoft’s MILLIONS of Magic Wand violations of Open Source Licenses. In this article, we will look at what is at stake in the California Copilot lawsuit. Here is a link to the lawsuit so you can read it yourself. https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/pdf/06823/1-0-github_complaint.pdf

Here is a link to a second 30 page Response that was filed on March 9, 2023 opposing Microsoft’s motion to dismiss this case: