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it's not just trained on GPL code. it's trained on code of incompatible licenses, which means that the code is produces is potentially unlicensable in general. There's of course also the question of attribution, which many licenses require

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I wonder who's decision was it to train the bots in 'code that is accessible to our scraper' and not in 'code we can sell derivatives products of'. I can tell the second group is quite small, so I understand the incentive, at least.

Maybe they chose the Uber strategy of 'What we are doing is bordering on illegal but by the time the bell rings we'll be valuable enough to write the law ourselves'.

Microsoft chose to not use all code that is accessible to their scraper. All proprietary closed repositories on github that large companies use are excluded. I can easily image all the lawsuit that would had happened if paying customers that kept company secrets hosted at github had been used and leaked by copilot.

The decision to only train it on "open" repositories was one of self preservation.

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