GitHub Copilot, which was launched in June, suggests code and functions to GitHub users in real time. Copilot is powered by Codex, an AI system that was created by OpenAI and licensed to Microsoft. According to OpenAI, Codex was trained on “millions of public repositories” and is “an instance of transformative fair use.” However, open-source programmers on GitHub disagree, claiming that Codex has violated their open-source licenses, which only allow non-commercial redistribution and modification of the code and often have restrictions including a requirement to preserve the name of the authors.
Microsoft-owned GitHub experienced a more than two-hour long outage today, affecting thousands or potentially millions of developers that rely on its many services. GitHub started experiencing issues at around 3:45PM ET, with Git operations, API requests, GitHub actions, packages, pages, and pull requests all affected.
GitHub is now home to more than 73 million developers that rely on the service for version control via Git and hosting for software development. GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies hosting entire projects and code on the service. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and many other big tech companies use GitHub.