Microsoft GitHub’s announcement of an AI-driven Service as a Software
Substitute (SaaSS) program called Copilot — which uses machine
learning to autocomplete code for developers as they write software —
immediately raised serious questions for the free software movement
and our ability to safeguard user and developer freedom. We felt these
questions needed to be addressed, as a variety of serious implications
were foreseen for the free software community and developers who use
GitHub. These inquiries — and others possibly yet to be discovered —
needed to be reviewed in depth.

In our call for papers, we set forth several areas of
interest. Most of these areas centered around copyright law, questions
of ownership for AI-generated code, and legal impacts for GitHub
authors who use a GNU or other copyleft license(s) for their
works. We are pleased to announce the community-provided research into
these areas, and much more.

First, we want to thank everyone who participated by sending in their
papers. We received a healthy response of twenty-two papers from
members of the community. The papers weighed-in on the multiple areas
of interest we had indicated in our announcement. Using an anonymous
review process, we concluded there were five papers that would be best
suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to
help guide our actions in the search for solutions.

These five submissions are not ranked, and we decided it best to just
let the papers speak for themselves. The papers contain opinions with
which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) m