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AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

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211–220 of 464 posts

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#211

> All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only How can you guarantee that will happen when AI has been trained a world full of multiple licenses and even closed source material without permission of the copyright owners...I confirmed that with several AI's just now.

Even human developers are unlikely to have only ever seen GPL-2.0-only code.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#212

[flagged]

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.

> He barks orders at cadre of human contributor agents and subsystem maintainer agents until the code looks the way he likes

That's called being a manager, not a vibe coder.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#213
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

Some people are just against change, that's nothing new. If Linus was like them, he would never have started linux in the first place.

Not every change is good, and sometimes we realise too late

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#214

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…

For [0], it was supposedly shown to do it when specifically prompted to do so.

Despite agentic tools being used by millions of developers now, I am not aware of a single real case where accidental reproduction of copyrightable code has been an issue.

Further, some model providers offer indemnity clauses.

It seems like a non-issue to me, practically.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#215
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

For those who might wonder how accurate this is, there is advice from the Federal Register to this effect. [0] Its quite comprehensive, and covers pretty much every question that might be asked about "What about...?"

> In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.

[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#216
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it. The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.

Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now?

They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source.

"corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed.

What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are just against change, that's nothing new. If Linus was like them, he would never have started linux in the first place.

Not every change is good, and sometimes we realise too late

What is it that worries you about the change that is happening?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#218
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it. The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.

The corporate moat is the army of lawyers they have. It doesn’t matter whether they win or not if you can’t afford endless litigation. Is the same for patents.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#219
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright. That is a non sequitur. Also, I'm not sure if copyright applies to humans, or persons (not that I have encountered particularly creative corporations, but Taranaki Maunga has been known for large scale decorative works)

A "large scale decorative work" is the strangest euphemism for a dormant volcano I've ever heard.

Well obviously it's not doing any decorating right at the moment.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#220
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

I don't think modified by a human is enough. If you take licensed text (code or otherwise) and manually replace every word with a synonym, it does not remove the license. If you manually change every loop into a map/filter, it does not remove the license. I don't think any amount of mechanical transformation, regardless if done by a human or machine erases it.

There's a threshold where you modify it enough, it is no longer recognizable as being a modification of the original and you might get away with it, unless you confess what process you used to create it.

This is different to learning from the original and then building something equivalent from scratch using only your memory without constantly looking back and forth between your copy and the original.

This is how some companies do "clear room reimplementations" - one team looks at the original and writes a spec, another team which has never seen the original code implements an entirely standalone version.

And of course there are people who claim this can be automated now[0]. This one is satire (read the blog) but it is possible if the law is interpreted the way LLM companies work and there are reports the website works as advertised by people who were willing to spend money to test it.

[0]: https://malus.sh/

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