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AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

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Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#311
post #253
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is music free now? The record industry doesn't exist anymore, isn't ridiculously profitable? Artists are finally earning a fair share?

Music is free, because music piracy is unenforceable so the law is irrelevant. Now, I personally buy most of my music on vinyl because I want to support artists, but absolutely nothing forces me to do that as all the music is available for free.

As far as I can see, the vast majority of people don’t pirate music these days (unlike 20 years ago). Most people wouldn’t even know where and how to pirate music. They just have Spotify or another streaming service.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#312
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like blaming a knife as being a killer weapon. Social media is inherently good if owners of the platforms allow for good interactions to take place. But given the mismatch between incentives alignment, we don't have nice things.

Social media is good if owners allow for good is an example of the logical fallacy "begging the question"

Also blaming the tool for the crime is some sort of fallacy. I don't know name you can ask AI.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#313
post #2

Good. The BSDs should follow suit. It is unreasonable to expect any developer not to use AI in 2026.

It’s perfectly reasonable. We’ve been doing it for decades. It’s completely unreasonable to expect every developer to use “ai”, especially when it comes at such a heavy monetary cost.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#314
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Because AI is also proving to be very good at reverse engineering proprietary binaries or just straight up cloning software from test suites or user interfaces. Cuts both ways.

Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, and especially in the USA thanks to the DMCA.

If the argument is just "They won't catch me", then yes you are correct.

But some of us are still forced to follow the law, whatever it might be.

Also: They still have patents on it.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funny, their army of lawyers seems incapable of stopping me from easily downloading pirated software or coding an open alternative to their closed-source software with AI if I wanted to.. You cannot keep a purely legally-enforced moat in the face of advancing technology.

I would caution against using this argument.

In the USA the DMCA can make it illegal to even own and use tools meant to bypass even the weakest of protection.

This law has already been used to ruin lives.

"They might catch the individual but not us all" is nice and fine until it is your turn, so check your legislation.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#317

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".

In what jurisdiction?! It’s weird how people on HN state legal opinion as fact… e.g if someone in the Philippines vibecodes an app and a person in Equador vibecodes a 100% copy of the source, what now?

There’s this thing called the Berne Convention. Countries that cooperate on copyright are going to standardize their interpretations on questions like this sooner or later.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. Linux today is a toy of corporations and stopped being community oriented a long time ago. Community orientation I think these days only exists among the BSD and some fringe linux distributions. The linux foundation itself, is just one big, woke, leftist mess, with CV-stuffers from corporations in every significant position.

The idea that something can simultaneously be "woke [and] leftist" and somehow still defined by its attachments to corporations is a baffling expression of how detached from reality the US political discourse is. The rest of the world looks on in wonder at both sides of this.

"I hate corporations and I hate leftists, ergo they must be the same thing"

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#319
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If monkeys can't hold copyright, which is an actual case discussed above, then no, an LLM probably can't either. "Human" is required.

Yeah, an LLM, being a machine obviously shouldn't hold copyright. But that doesn't stop people claiming that running vast amounts of code through an LLM can strip copyright from it. Ultimately LLMs (the first L stands for large and for a good reason) are only possible to create by taking unimaginable amounts of work performed by humans who have not consented to their work being used that way, most of whom require at…

Almost all the productivity enhancement provided by an AI coding assistant is provided by circumventing the copyright laws, with the remaining enhancement being provided by the fact that it automates the search-copy-paste loop that you would do if you had direct access to the programs used during training.

(Much of the apparent gain of the automatic search-copy-paste is wasted by skipping the review phase that would have been done at that time when that were done manually, which must then be done in a slower manner when you must review the harder-to-understand entire program generated by the AI assistant.)

Despite the fact that AI coding assistants are copyright breaking tricks, the fact that this has become somehow allowed is an overall positive development.

The concept of copyright for programs has been completely flawed from its very beginning. The reason is that it is absolutely impossible to write any kind of program that is not a derivative of earlier programs.

Any program is made by combining various standard patterns and program structures. You can construct a derivation sequence between almost any 2 programs, where you decompose the first in some typical blocks, than compose the second program from such blocks, while renaming all identifiers.

It is quite subjective to decide when a derivation sequence becomes complex enough that the second program should not be considered as a derivative of the first from the point of view of copyright.

The only way to avoid the copyright restrictions is to exploit loopholes in the law, e.g. if translating an algorithm to a different programming language does not count as being derivative or when doing other superficial automatic transformations of a source program changes its appearance sufficiently that it is not recognized as derivative, even if it actually is. Or when combining a great number of fragments from different programs is again not recognized as derivative, though it still kind of is.

The only way how it became possible for software companies like Microsoft or Adobe to copyright their s*t is because the software industry based on copyrighted programs has been jumpstarted by a few decades of programming during which programs were not copyrighted, which could then be used as a base by the first copyrighted programs.

So AI coding agents allow you to create programs that you could not have written when respecting the copyright laws. They also may prevent you from proving that a program written by someone else infringes upon the copyright that you claim for a program written with assistance.

I believe that both these developments are likely to have more positive consequences than negative consequences. The methods used first in USA and then also in most other countries (due to blackmailing by USA) for abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades.

The most ridiculous claim about the copyright of programs is that it is somehow beneficial for "creators". Artistic copyrights sometimes are beneficial for creators, but copyrights on non-open-source programs are almost never owned by creators, but by their employers, and even those have only seldom any direct benefit from the copyright, but they use it with the hope that it might prevent competition.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#320
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.

> If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it.

Nitpicking on the license here, but please don't use MIT, it has no patent grant protections.

And those are never covered in any AI-washing anyway.

There are equivalent licenses with patent grant protection, like 'Apache2+LLVM exception' or 'Mozilla Public License 2' and others...

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