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Linus is the original vibe coder. He barks orders at cadre of human contributor agents and subsystem maintainer agents until the code looks the way he likes.
LoL.
Jesting aside, OpenHub lists Linus Torvalds as having made 46,338 commits. 45,178 for Linux, 1,118 for Git. His most recent commit was 17 days ago. [1]
That is a far cry from a vibe-coder, no? :-)
Bit unfair to call his leadership vibe-coding, methinks.
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AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright. The work might hypothetically infringe on other people's copyright. But such an infringement does not happen until a human decides to create and distribute a work that somehow integrates that generated code or text. The solution documented here seems very pragmatic. You as a contribut…
Didn't a court in the US declare that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted? I think that could be a problem for AI generated code. Fine for projects with an MIT/BSD license I suppose, but GPL relies on copyright. However, if the code has been slightly changed by a human, it can be copyrighted again. I think.
US Copyright Office guidance in 2023 said work created with the help of AI can be registered as long as there is "sufficient human creative input". I don't believe that has ever been qualified with respect to code, but my instinct is that the way most people use coding agents (especially for something like kernel development) would qualify.
This feels like the OSS community is giving up. LLMs are lossily-compressed models of code and other text (often mass-scraped despite explicit non-consent) which has licenses almost always requiring attribution and very often other conditions. Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0]. The idea of intelligence being emergent from compression is nothing new[1]. Th…
> Just like stealing fractional amounts of money[3] should not be legal, violating the licenses of the training data by reusing fractional amounts from each should not be legal either. I think you'll find that this is not settled in the courts, depending on how the data was obtained. If the data was obtained legally, say a purchased book, courts have been finding that using it for training is fair use ( Bartz v. Anth…
Yes.
I have 2 issues with "post-scarcity":
- It often implicitly assumes humanity is one homogeneous group where this state applies to everyone. In reality, if post-scarcity is possible, some people will be lucky enough to have the means to live that lifestyle while others will still by dying of hunger, exposure and preventable diseases. All else being equal, I'd prefer being in the first group and my chance for that is being economically relevant.
- It often ignores that some people are OK with having enough while others have a need to have more than others, no matter how much they already have. The second group is the largest cause of exploitation and suffering in the world. And the second group will continue existing in a post-scarcity world and will work hard to make scarcity a real thing again.
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Back to your question:
I made the mistake of publishing most of my public code under GPL or AGPL. I regret is because even though my work has brought many people some joy and a bit of my work was perhaps even useful, it has also been used by people who actively enjoy hurting others, who have caused measurable harm and who will continue causing harm as long as they're able to - in a small part enabled by my code.
Permissive licenses are socially agnostic - you can use the work and build on top of it no matter who you are and for what purpose.
A(GPL) is weakly pro-social - you can use the work no matter what but you can only build on top of it if you give back - this produces some small but non-zero social pressure (enforced by violence through governments) which benefits those who prefer cooperation instead of competition.
What I want is a strongly pro-social license - you can use or build on top of my work only if you fulfill criteria I specify such as being a net social good, not having committed any serious offenses, not taking actions to restrict other people's rights without a valid reason, etc.
There have been attempts in this direction[0] but not very successful.
In a world without LLMs, I'd be writing code using such a license but more clearly specified, even if I had to write my own. Yes, a layer would do a better job, that does not mean anything written by a non-lawyer is completely unenforceable.
With LLMs, I have stopped writing public code at all because the way I see it, it just makes people much richer than me even richer at a much faster rate than I can ever achieve myself. Ir just makes inequality worse. And with inequality, exploitation and oppression tends to soon follow.
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Would you say "assisted by vim" or "assisted by gcc"? It should be either something like "(partially/completely) generated by" or if you want to include deterministic tools, then "Tools-used:". The Turing test is an interesting thought experiment but we've seen it's easy for LLMs to sound human-like or make authoritative and convincing statements despite being completely wrong or full of nonsense. The Turing test is…
If a linter insists on a weird line of code, I’m probably commenting that line as “recommended by whatever-linter”, yes.
I can't point out where I draw the line clearly but here's one different I notice:
A recommendation can be both a thing and an action. A piece of text is a recommendation and it does not matter how it was created.
Assistance implies some parity in capabilities and cooperative work. Also it can pretty much only be an action, you cannot say "here is some assistance" and point to a thing.
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And yet it puts a stop to the tsunami of slop and it's pretty much impossible to prove anything of value was lost.
but why? it's a human making the PR and you can shame/ban that human anyway.
Linux is somewhat harder to contribute to and they already have sufficient barriers in place so they can rely on more reasonable human actors.
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What law exactly are you suggesting needs to be changed? How is this any different from what already happens right now, today?
Right now it's very easy not to infringe on copyrighted code if you write the code yourself. In the vast majority of cases if you infringed it's because you did something wrong that you could have prevented (in the case where you didn't do anything wrong, inducement creation is an affirmative defense against copyright infringement). That is not the case when using AI generated code. There is no way to use it without…
Humans routinely produce code similar to or identical to existing copyrighted code without direct copying.
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In this case, the "fall guy" is the person who actually introduced the code in question into the codebase. They wouldn't be some patsy that is around just to take blame, but the actual responsible party for the issue.
Imagine your a factory owner and you need a chemical delivered from across the country, but the chemical is dangerous and if the tanker truck drives faster than 50 miles per hour it has a 0.001% chance per mile of exploding. You hire an independent contractor and tell him that he can drive 60 miles per hour if he wants to but if it explodes he accepts responsibility. He does and it explodes killing 10 people. If the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine your a factory owner and you need a chemical delivered from across the country, but the chemical is dangerous and if the tanker truck drives faster than 50 miles per hour it has a 0.001% chance per mile of exploding. You hire an independent contractor and tell him that he can drive 60 miles per hour if he wants to but if it explodes he accepts responsibility. He does and it explodes killing 10 people. If the…
That is a nonsensical analogy on multiple levels, and doesn't even support your own argument.