AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

It's laundering in any reasonable meaning of the word. Whether it's legal according to the letter of the law is being decided.

Please differentiate morality and legality as well as intent and letter of the law.

> If anything AI code is cheap enough to even things out.

1) Do you think people have and will have access to the same models as large corporations internally, especially those who train LLMs themselves? Nothing stopping Google from excluding its own source code from the publicly available models but including it for internal models.

2) It's not just about the code, it's about the whole pipeline from nothing to a finished product and revenue stream. Did you know half the price of a new car is marketing? How much you can spend on ads, legal, market research, sales reps, etc. In some areas, especially B2B, nobody will even talk to you if you're a single guy in a shed, companies want stability, predictability and long term support.

3) More crudely, if you wanted to influence product selection or government elections, how many tokens could you afford for LLMs to influence online discussions, how many residential IPs could you afford, how much data could you buy about users to target each one specifically? Rich people will clearly have an advantage there.

Basically, if the cost of code goes towards zero, other factors will play a larger role.

> I think a lot of those people are consistent!

Only if they're consistently applying the rules to others but not themselves. Otherwise "permanent and total control over any idea they have" means they could never base anything on other people's ideas.

This is a subject so vast that giving examples requires a book-length text. IIRC at least one or two books have actually been written about this, but I am too lazy to search now for their titles.

I am more familiar with what happened in cryptography, where many algorithms have begun to be used only after the 20 years or more required for their patents to expire, while as long as patents remained valid, inferior solutions were used, wasting energy and computing time.

Regarding copyrights, I know best my own activity, but I am pretty certain that this anecdotal experience is representative for many programmers.

During the first decades of computer programming, until the seventies, there have been a lot of discussions about software reuse as the main factor that can improve programming productivity, and about which features of the programming languages and of the available programming tools can increase the amount of reuse, like modularity.

However all those discussions were naive, because later the amount of reuse has remained much lower than predicted, but the causes were not technical, but the copyright laws. Open-source programs have become the main weapon against the copyright laws, which enable the reuse of software nowadays.

However the value of software reuse has never been understood by the management of many companies. In decades of working as a programmer, I have wasted a lot of time with writing programs in such a manner so that whoever was my employer could claim the copyright for them.

There were plenty of opportunities when I could have used open-source programs, but I could not use them as there was someone who insisted that the product must contain "software IP" owned by the company. Therefore I had to waste time by rewriting something equivalent with what I could have used instantaneously, but different enough to be copyrightable.

There were also other cases that were even more annoying, when I had to waste time by rewriting programs that I had already written in the past, but in a different way so that there will be no copyright infringement. Some times the old programs were written when being employed elsewhere, other times they were programs written for myself, during my own time and on my own computers. In such cases, I could not use my own programs, as the employer would then claim copyright on them, so I would lose ownership and I would not be able to use them in the future, for my own needs.

There are many projects where I have wasted more time avoiding copyrights than solving problems. I believe that there must be many others who must have had similar experiences.

So I welcome the copyright-washing AI coding assistants, which can be employed successfully in such cases in order to avoid the wasteful duplication of work.