For the Chinese and English version, please click "ASF Legal Committee Publishes Generative AI Guidelines for Contributors (Chinese and English)" to view
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year or so, chances are you've heard a lot about how generative artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing and is rapidly changing the software industry as we know it. While it's fun to speculate when tools like GitHub's Copilot will put all us programmers out of work [1] , there's a more pressing issue when it comes to open source software: the impact on intellectual property.
Although we have not thought too much about this issue, in the final analysis, each of us who contributes to open source software is exercising our personal rights, licensing the fruits of our labor to others, or donating something that we did not create but Something you have the right to share. In fact, any committer who contributes to the Apache Software Foundation's more than 300 active projects does so after explicitly signing the Individual Contributor License Agreement [2] ( ICLA ):
"You represent that each of your Contributions is an original work of yours (see ICLA Section 7 for works submitted on behalf of others)"
The criteria for "your originality" are easy to understand if you just typed a page of code on a whim, but beyond that the lines can get very blurry very quickly. Even before the advent of generative AI, open source developers struggled with this question: “If my integrated development environment (IDE) completes code that I didn’t type in – is that line of code really original to me? ?” or “If I end up on StackOverflow and from one of the threads there, I get a seemingly trivial line of code on how to deal with a particularly tricky problem – I can incorporate it into (my program) ?" or (my personal favorite) "If the only way I code is by pair programming - then the code that comes out of that two-headed, four-armed monster is Whose original is it?”
Now, I would say that, like most things related to IP management, the answer to this type of question is "it depends," and from ASF's point of view, we try to address this type of "it depends." It would not be too much to document the issue [3] as it depends on the circumstances. When it comes to generative AI, however, the ASF's Legal Committee believes that a piecemeal approach does not really solve the problem; not only because of the importance of the topic, but also because of the rapid development of the entire legal system surrounding it.
Therefore, a dedicated ASF generation tool guide [4] page came into being.
If you are an ASF contributor planning to use any generation tool (whether powered by AI or not), we strongly recommend that you read this document and follow its guidance. We are also seeking feedback on our recommendations. The easiest way to provide this type of feedback is to contact the ASF Legal Committee:
Finally, if writing this guide wasn't a community effort, it wouldn't be truly open source. I would like to thank all members of the ASF Legal Committee, especially Henri Yandell, for their work and dedication in balancing actionable advice with legal rigor. On another level, I also want to thank the Linux Foundation for its leadership in not rushing the ducks to the bottom of things, but in encouraging all the different open source foundations (including ASF) to start thinking about this space in common terms and talking to each other about it. Agree on policies with similar views. Keep an eye on this space and you'll find a lot of similar guidance coming out this year.
Note:
[1]https://hackaday.com/2023/03/08/will-a-i-steal-all-the-code-and-take-all-the-jobs/
[2]https://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.pdf
[3]https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html
[4]https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html
Reprinted from丨Open Source Rainforest
Author丨Roman Shaposhnik
Translation丨Liu Tiandong Ted
Editor丨Deng Ziyi
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Introduction to Kaiyuan Society
Kaiyuanshe (English name: "KAIYUANSHE") was established in 2014. It is an open source community composed of individual volunteers who volunteer to contribute to the open source cause and based on the principles of "contribution, consensus, and co-governance " . Kaiyuan Society has always maintained the concept of "vendor neutrality, public welfare, and non-profit", with the vision of "based on China, contributing to the world, and promoting open source as a way of life in the new era" , and with "open source governance, international integration, community development, and project incubation" Our mission is to create a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem.
Kaiyuan Society actively cooperates closely with communities, universities, enterprises and government-related units that support open source. It is also the first member of OSI, a global open source protocol certification organization, in China.
Since 2016, it has held the China Open Source Annual Conference (COSCon) continuously, continuously released the "China Open Source Annual Report", and jointly launched the "China Open Source Pioneer List", "China Open Source Code Power List", etc., which has had a wide impact at home and abroad. force.
