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Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

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Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#161

Post by throw1234567891 »

inejge wrote: post #108
throw1234567891 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been established that LLM-generated code is not copyrighted so I can fully understand the company living from copyrighted data to not accept LLM-generated contributions.

> It’s been established that LLM-generated code is not copyrighted If that's a reference to Thaler v. Perlmutter, the only thing that's been established is that an LLM can't be considered an author under the Copyright Act, only a human being can. It says nothing about the consequences of a human claiming authorship of LLM-generated code, which would be relevant here.

You lay out my words in different order and claim I’m not correct.

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#162

Post by tokioyoyo »

jknoepfler wrote: post #158
tokioyoyo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you use frontier AI dev tools on a daily basis professionally?

I manage several teams of developers who use them every day professionally and use them for personal projects privately. Just last week, at the prompting of said devs, we had a working agreement conversation about curtailing the use of AI in our codebases because of rapid erosion of our teams' ability to operate, update and maintain codebases that had started to spill over with slop. We have had multiple incidents of…

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Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#163

Post by qwery »

It's hardly a surprise to see a behemoth like Oracle doing this. Accepting LLM contributions can only be a liability, particularly for such a mature, stable project. Even if you see that liability as small or insignificant, it's non-zero. Given the project and the company, choosing zero additional liability seems like the obvious choice.

One also assumes the people maintaining OpenJDK have had their workload increase to an unmanageable level, like a lot of other free software projects and one thing I'm sure everyone can agree on is that Oracle certainly won't want to pay anyone more or hire more people to deal with that.

A lot of people (including the Register[0]) are pointing out that Oracle leadership are gung-ho about using LLMs for everything, and this seems to go against that. It makes sense to question this from a journalistic angle -- the executives are obviously full of shit and people would do well to remember that the next time one of them opens their mouth. But pointing at the apparent contradiction -- different rules for internal projects vs. open ones -- doesn't seem particularly meaningful on its own:

I don't think the CEO/CTO raving about LLMs should be taken as firm statements about how they actually operate internally. I'm surprised that this does not seem to be the default case. Among other things, Oracle stands to profit from greater adoption of LLM tools.

It would be unrealistic/unreasonable to expect their employees/contractors working on internal projects to be held to the same standard/guidelines/rules as developers contributing to a free software project. This applies either way, whichever side (internal/open) has the worse deal.

I don't know what the rules are for their internal teams. As far as I know, I'm not alone in that. Oracle also don't need to post anything publicly to change those rules.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el...

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#164

Post by ux266478 »

ncruces wrote: post #100
ux266478 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's even more pervasive than that. Why bother forking software at all? At the point in which code generation is meaningfully trivialized, software becomes entirely disposable. Anything you want, have a model spin it up. You don't even need libraries, the model can just make everything in-situ, who cares? Why on earth would I ever want to use SQLite if I have access to a sufficiently advanced code generator w…

> Why on earth would I ever want to use SQLite if I have access to a sufficiently advanced code generator which can generate me a similarly high quality database system Because SQLite has 10k requirements that wouldn't even cross your mind to write down, but 80% of which are useful to you.

The nice thing about natural language is that nesting semantic layers is free and arbitrary, and far more tractable than in a formal grammar. Every natural language is like coherentist ω-order logic. Effectively, I don't have to write the 10k requirements. I only need to provide a sufficient metatheory that can be extrapolatable to those 10k requirements, and that can include embedded theory I did not write myself but am familiar with enough to invoke, as well as refinement criteria ranging from the fuzzy to the explicit with priority weighting parameters to describe the shape in which I want the search space pruned.

This isn't anything new or particularly interesting. It's the entire basis upon which ILP demonstrated generality. A metatheory to synthesize 10 trillion rules isn't even scratching the surface of what you can reasonably do. The key was finding out the tractable semantics for actually computing it in reasonable amount of time, which right now is looking decidedly like informal semantics was the answer the whole time.

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#165

Post by dofm »

dan_q wrote: post #147
dofm wrote: post #128

This is the firm whose debt is one level above junk and whose survival as a single unbroken corporate entity is fully predicated on OpenAI being able to make money from the data centres they (Oracle) are building for them, let alone simply paying for them. I accept @jerf's explanation is the right one but this is an absolutely almighty signal that AI-first developers should heed. And someone should ask Altman about i…

I don't think you should take "AI-first developers" seriously as a category. The people you refer to are delusional idiots and should be treated as such.

I don't disagree. But at the moment it is ~all major tech CEOs, right? Companies everywhere are saying "increasingly we don't write our own code". Out loud in front of their investors and customers. Even Oracle did.

But people at Oracle below the C suite don't even fart in public without lawyers signing off.

This is Oracle telling quite a lot of customers and partners of one of their most significant products that it doesn't trust AI code to be safe. Oracle, the company that is more exposed to the bubble bursting than basically anyone else apart from Coreweave.

This message could have been a lot shorter, could have said they were pausing accepting AI submissions until the intellectual property situation was clarified, but no — they said AI code can be unsafe and insecure and it's too risky to accept it. So a good question (given that Oracle are fucked if OpenAI even stumbles) is why?

That is a heck of a message to send, and it is visible enough. That is why I think developers (by which I mean individuals and their companies) whose focus is AI-generated code, which is almost everyone in public, should pay a bit of attention.

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#166

Post by dan_q »

jknoepfler wrote: post #158
tokioyoyo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you use frontier AI dev tools on a daily basis professionally?

I manage several teams of developers who use them every day professionally and use them for personal projects privately. Just last week, at the prompting of said devs, we had a working agreement conversation about curtailing the use of AI in our codebases because of rapid erosion of our teams' ability to operate, update and maintain codebases that had started to spill over with slop. We have had multiple incidents of…

> most importantly developers saying "we no longer know how this code works but it's massively bloated and unreadable and we can't tell you with a straight face that we can maintain it or fix it if it breaks."

To anyone reading this: If you couldn't see this coming three years ago, you don't deserve your job.

> We have seen a flood of vibe-PRs from engineering adjacent teams that suddenly think they can code shipping prototypes into production that do not work do not scale and cannot be maintained.

What a nightmare. Never forget that AI is for idiots.

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#167

Post by quickthrowman »

cautiouscat wrote: post #23

I kind of get their overall point, even if it is ironic that Oracle is all in on AI. They don’t want a ton of contributions to review that weren’t made with care, adding burden to, as they put it: “already limited time of human reviewers”. Especially for a project that runs to many major businesses, this could pose a massive risk.

Oracle is primarily a legal department that sells software licenses to give their lawyers something to extract money from customers with.

Google “Oracle org chart meme” and look at image results, only it’s not a meme.

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#168

Post by [deleted] »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #109
jknoepfler wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, their internal PRs have the same problem, but they are pushing an AI narrative from the c-suite and can hide the reality of their private code bases. The "limited ROI on AI investment" articles will continue to percolate slowly into the brains of the LinkedIn hive-mind until we hit a tipping point, and then we'll finally shut up about how a handy dev tool with some decent use-cases is the dawning of the singulari…

Out of curiosity, do you use frontier AI dev tools on a daily basis professionally?

[deleted]

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#169

Post by henryfjordan »

ethin wrote: post #151
semiquaver wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false narrative based on a (IMO often intentional) misunderstanding. It has by no means been established by any court that LLM-generated code is not copyrightable. Thaler v. Perlmutter stands for a much narrower proposition and at any rate is not binding nationally, SCOTUS having denied certiorari.

This is not necessarily true. While no court has explicitly come out and said that copyright does not apply to AI-generated works of authorship, the US copyright office has[0]: > Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations: > • Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursu…

The courts are 100% going to have to interpret what is "sufficient human control" at some point.

Re: Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

#170

Post by ethin »

henryfjordan wrote: post #169
ethin wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not necessarily true. While no court has explicitly come out and said that copyright does not apply to AI-generated works of authorship, the US copyright office has[0]: > Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations: > • Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursu…

The courts are 100% going to have to interpret what is "sufficient human control" at some point.

Sure, but I would be incredibly shocked if the courts overturned these conclusions. These kinds of determinations are within the remit of the USCO, so a court does not need to come out and say it if the USCO has already done so. Obviously, as I said it would be better if congress weighed in and solved this problem, given that the USCO is free to publish a new NOI to change it's practices/policies, but we all know that congress is too gridlocked atm for that to happen
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