11 ms·

Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the license. That's... refreshingly normal

by qsort 6mo ago

Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the license. That's... refreshingly normal? Surely something most people acting in good faith can get behind.

galaxyLogic 6mo ago
But then if AI output is not under GNU General Public License, how can it become so just because a Linux-developer adds it to the code-base?
- afro88 6mo ago
  Same as if a regular person did the same. They are responsible for it. If you're using AI, check the code doesn't violate licenses
  - sarchertech 6mo ago
    How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.
    - shevy-java 6mo ago
      But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.
      - sarchertech 6mo ago
        In a court case the responsibility party very well could be the Linux foundation because this is a foreseeable consequence of allowing AI contributions. There’s no reasonable way for a human to make such a guarantee while using AI generated code.
        Chance-Device 6mo ago
        It’s not about the mechanism: responsibility is a social construct, it works the way people say that it works. If we all agree that a human can agree to bear the responsibility for AI outputs, and face any consequences resulting from those outputs, then that’s the whole shebang.
        sarchertech 6mo ago
        Sure we could change the law. It would be a stupid change to allow individuals, organizations, and companies to completely shield themselves from the consequences of risky behaviors (more than we already do) simply by assigning all liability to a fall guy.
        bpt3 6mo ago
        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.
        sarchertech 6mo ago
        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 family of those 10 people has evidence you created the conditions to cause the explosion in order to benefit your company, you're probably going to lose in civil court. Linus benefits from the increase velocity of people using AI. He doesn't get to put all the liability on the people contributing.
        bpt3 6mo ago
        That is a nonsensical analogy on multiple levels, and doesn't even support your own argument.
      - Cytobit 6mo ago
        That's not going to shield the Linux organization.
        cxr 6mo ago
        A DCO bearing a claim of original authorship (or assertion of other permitted use) isn't going to shield them entirely, but it can mitigate liability and damages.
        sarchertech 6mo ago
        Can it though? As far as I know this hasn’t been tested.
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      - aargh_aargh 6mo ago
        The practical concern of Linux developers regarding responsibility is not being able to ban the author, it's that the author should take ongoing care for his contribution.
    - Andrex 6mo ago
      Let me introduce you to the concept of submarine patents...
  - martin-t 6mo ago
    As opposed to an irregular person? LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is a massive hack causing massive issues such as using corporate finances for political gain). A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has limitations in both time and memory available, a model of text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have any relevance. Just because a human can do something does not mean machines run by corporations should be able to do it en-masse. The rules of copyright allow humans to do certain things because: - Learning enriches the human. - Once a human consumes information, he can't willingly forget it. - It is impossible to prove how much a human-created intellectual work is based on others. With LLMs: - Training (let's not anthropomorphize: lossily-compressing input data by detecting and extracting patterns) enriches only the corporation which owns it. - It's perfectly possible to create a model based only on content with specific licenses or only public domain. - It's possible to trace every single output byte to quantifiable influences from every single input byte. It's just not an interesting line of inquiry for the corporations benefiting from the legal gray area.
    - afro88 6mo ago
      Dude come on, I clearly wasn't saying LLMs are people. My point was it's a tool and it's the responsibility of the person wielding it to check outputs. If it's too hard to check outputs, don't use the tool. Your arguments about copyright being different for LLMs: at the moment that's still being defined legally. So for now it's an ethical concern rather than a legal one. For what it's worth I agree that LLMs being trained on copyright material is an abuse of current human oriented copyright laws. There's no way this will just continue to happen. Megacorps aren't going to lie down if there's a piece of the pie on the table, and then there's precedent for everyone else (class action perhaps)
      - martin-t 6mo ago
        Alright, I did make that assumption because I've seen and heard people talk about LLM as people. It worries me that otherwise functional and reasonable people, some of them my friends, have been so easily been convinced by a machine which demonstrated its flaws to me daily. As for checking outputs - I don't believe that's sufficient. Maybe the letter of the law is flawed but according to the spirit the model itself is derivative work. A model takes several orders of magnitude more work as training data than it takes to code the training algorithm itself, to any reasonable and sane person, that makes it a derivative work of the training data by nearly 100% - we can only argue how many nines it should be. > precedent Yeah but the US system makes me very uneasy about it. The right way to do this is to sit down, talk about the options and their downstream implications, talking about fairness and justice and then deciding what the law should be. If we did that, copyright law would look very different in the first place and this whole thing would have an obvious solution.
  - rzmmm 6mo ago
    In certain law cases plagiarization can be influenced by the fact if person is exposed to the copyrighted work. AI models are exposed to very large corpus of works..
    - cxr 6mo ago
      Copyright infringement and plagiarism are not the same or even very closely related. They're different concepts and not interchangeable. Relative to copyright infringement, cases of plagiarism are rarely a matter for courts to decide or care about at all. Plagiarism is primarily an ethical (and not civil or criminal) matter. Rather than be dealt with by the legal system, it is the subject of codes of ethics within e.g. academia, journalism, etc. which have their own extra-judicial standards and methods of enforcement.
      - dekhn 6mo ago
        I suspect they were instead referring to patents; for example, when I worked at Google, they told the engineers not to read patents because then the engineer might invent something infringing, I think it's called willful infringement. No other employer I've worked for has every raised this as an issue, while many lawyers at google would warn against this.
      - martin-t 6mo ago
        You're right, legally speaking. But you shouldn't be right. I mean, morally. The law is a compromise between what the people in power want and what they can get away with without people revolting. It has nothing to do with morality, fairness or justice. And we should change that. The promise of democracy was (among other things) that everyone would be equal, everybody would get to vote and laws would be decided by the moral system of the majority. And yet, today, most people will tell you they are unhappy about the rising cost of living and rising inequality... The law should be based on complete and consistent moral system. And then plagiarism (taking advantage of another person's intellectual work without credit or compensation) would absolutely be a legal matter.
- panzi 6mo ago
  If the output is public domain it's fine as I understand it.
  - galaxyLogic 6mo ago
    Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ? Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
    - robinsonb5 6mo ago
      > Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong? You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish. The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.
      - cwnyth 6mo ago
        This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it, copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public domain for someone else to do something with. If I use public domain code in a project under a license, the whole work remains under the license, but not the public domain code. I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.
        manwe150 6mo ago
        If someone else uses your exact same prompt to generate the exact same code, can you claim copyright infringement against them? If the output is possible to copyright, then you could claim their prompt is infringement (just like if it reproduced Harry Potter). If it isn’t copyrightable, then the kernel would not have legal standing to enforce the GPL on those lines of code against any future AI reproduction of them. The developers might need to show that the code is licensed under GPL and only GPL, otherwise there is the possibility the same original contributor (eg the AI) did permit the copy. The GPL is an imposed restriction on what the kernel can legally do with any code contributions. That seems legally complicated for some projects—probably not the kernel with the large amount of pre-AI code, but maybe it spells trouble for smaller newer projects if they want to sue over infringement. IANAL.
- noosphr 6mo ago
  Tab complete does not produce copyrightable material either. Yet we don't require software to be written in nano.
  - rpdillon 6mo ago
    This is a nice point that I haven't seen before. It's interesting to regress AI to the simplest form and see how we treat it as a test for the more complex cases.
- jillesvangurp 6mo ago
  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 contributor simply state that you are making the contribution and that you are not infringing on other people's work with that contribution under the GPLv2. And you document the fact that you used AI for transparency reasons. There is a lot of legal murkiness around how training data is handled, and the output of the models. Or even the models themselves. Is something that in no way or shape resembles a copyrighted work (i.e. a model) actually distributing that work? The legal arguments here will probably take a long time to settle but it seems the fair use concept offers a way out here. You might create potentially infringing work with a model that may or may not be covered by fair use. But that would be your decision. For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use.
  - ninjagoo 6mo ago
    IANAL; this is what my limited understanding of the matter is. With that caveat: it is easy to forget that copyright is on output- verbatim or exact reproductions and derivatives of a covered work are already covered under copyright. So if the AI outputs Starry Night or Starry Night in different color theme, that's likely infringement without permission from van Gogh, who would have recourse against someone, either the user or the AI provider. But a starry-night style picture of an aquarium might not be infringing at all. >For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use. I would argue that if it was a verbatim reproduction of a copyrighted piece of software, that would likely be infringing. But if it was similar only in style, with different function names and structure, probably not infringing. Folks will argue that some things might be too small to do any different, for example a tiny snippet like python print("hello") or 1+1=2 or a for loop in your example. In that case it's too lacking in original expression to qualify for copyright protection anyway.
- Tomte 6mo ago
  There is already lots and lots of non-GPL code in the kernel, under dozens of licenses, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/package-analysis/refs/heads/main/analysed-packages/linux/version-6.1.58/linux-6.1.58-OSS-disclosure.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/pac... As long as everything is GPLv2-compatible it‘s okay.
shevy-java 6mo ago
But why should AI then be attributed if it is merely a tool that is used?
- yrds96 6mo ago
  AI tools can do the entire job from finding the problem, implementing and testing it. It's different from the regular single purpose static tools.
- plmpsu 6mo ago
  it makes sense to keep track of what model wrote what code to look for patterns, behaviors, etc.
- streetfighter64 6mo ago
  It isn't? > AI agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags. Only humans can legally certify the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). They mention an Assisted-by tag, but that also contains stuff like "clang-tidy". Surely you're not interpreting that as people "attributing" the work to the linter?
- lonelyasacloud 6mo ago
  Having an honesty based tag could be only way to monitor impact or get after a fix in code bases if things go south. That is at the moment: - Nobody knows for sure what agents might add and their long term effects on codebases. - It's at best unclear that AI content in a codebase can be reliably determined automatically. - Even if it's not malicious, at least some of its contributions are likely to be deleterious and pass undetected by human review.
- hgoel 6mo ago
  This is a good point but I'd take it in the opposite direction from the implication, we should document which tools were used in general, it'd be a neat indicator of what people use.
pibaker 6mo ago
I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place. I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call them out they just blame it on the AI coding tools they are using as if they are not opening PRs under their own names. I can't blame any open source maintainer for being at least a little sceptical when it comes to AI generated contributions.
- theptip 6mo ago
  I think them stating this very simple policy should also be read as them explicitly not making a more restrictive policy, as some kernel maintainers were proposing.
  - Applejinx 6mo ago
    From everything I'm seeing in the industry (I'm basically a noncoder choosing to not use AI in the stuff that I make, and privy to the private work experience of coders and creators also in that field because of human social contacts), I feel like I can shed a bit of light. It looks to me like a more restrictive policy will be flat-out impossible. Even people I trust are going along with this stuff, akin to CAD replacing drafting. Code is logic as language, and starting with web code and rapidly metastasizing to C++ (due to complexity and the sheer size of the extant codebase, good and bad) the AI has turned slop-coding to a 'solved problem'. If you don't mean to do the best possible thing or a new thing there is no excuse for existing as a coder in the world of AI. If you do expect to do a new thing or a best thing, in theory you're required to put out the novel information as AI cannot reach it until you've entered it into the corpus of existing code the AI's built on. However, if you're simply recombining existing aspects of the code language in a novel way, that might be more reachable… that's probably where 'AI escape velocity' will come from should it occur. In practice, everybody I know is relegating the busywork of coding to AI. I don't feel social pressure to do the same but I'm not a coder. I'm something else that produces MIT-licensed codebases for accomplishing things that aren't represented in code AS code, rather it's for accomplishing things that are specific and experiential. I write code to make specific noises I'm not hearing elsewhere, and not hearing out of the mainstream of 'sound-making code artifacts'. Therefore, it's impractical for Linux to take any position forbidding AI-assisted code. People will just lie and claim they did it. Is primitive tab-complete also AI? Where's the line? What about when coding tools uniformly begin to tab-complete with extensive reasoning and code prototyping? I already see this in the JetBrains Rider editor I use for Godot hacking, even though I've turned off everything I can related to AI. It'll still try to tab-complete patterns it thinks it recognizes, rarely with what I intend. And so the choice is to enforce responsibility. I think this is appropriate because that's where the choices will matter. Additions and alterations will be the responsibility of specific human people, which won't handle everything negative that's happening but will allow for some pressures and expectations that are useful. I don't think you can be a collaborative software project right now and not deal with this in some way. I get out of it because I'm read-only: I'm writing stuff on a codebase that lives on an antique laptop without internet access that couldn't run AI if it tried. Very likely the only web browsers it can run are similarly unable to handle 2026 web pages, though I've not checked in years. You've only got my word for that, though, and your estimation of my veracity based on how plausible it seems (I code publically on livestreams, and am not at all an impressive coder when I do that). Linux can't do what I do, so it's going to do what Linux does, and this seems the best option.
lrvick 6mo ago
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.
- ebbi 6mo ago
  True - on Mastodon there is a very vocal crowd that are against AI in general, and are identifying Linux distros that have AI generated code with the view of boycotting it.
  - lrvick 6mo ago
    Soon they will have to boycott all of them. Then what I wonder?
- cinntaile 6mo ago
  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.
  - goatlover 6mo ago
    Are they against change in general, or certain kinds of change? Remember when social media was seen as near universal good kind of progress? Not so much now.
    - contraposit 6mo ago
      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.
      - dwedge 6mo ago
oompydoompy74 6mo ago
I wish everyone could be so rational, well reasoned, and balanced on this subject.

by qsort 6mo ago

galaxyLogic 6mo ago

But then if AI output is not under GNU General Public License, how can it become so just because a Linux-developer adds it to the code-base?

afro88 6mo ago
Same as if a regular person did the same. They are responsible for it. If you're using AI, check the code doesn't violate licenses
- sarchertech 6mo ago
  How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.
  - shevy-java 6mo ago
    But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.
    - sarchertech 6mo ago
      In a court case the responsibility party very well could be the Linux foundation because this is a foreseeable consequence of allowing AI contributions. There’s no reasonable way for a human to make such a guarantee while using AI generated code.
      - Chance-Device 6mo ago
        It’s not about the mechanism: responsibility is a social construct, it works the way people say that it works. If we all agree that a human can agree to bear the responsibility for AI outputs, and face any consequences resulting from those outputs, then that’s the whole shebang.
        sarchertech 6mo ago
        Sure we could change the law. It would be a stupid change to allow individuals, organizations, and companies to completely shield themselves from the consequences of risky behaviors (more than we already do) simply by assigning all liability to a fall guy.
        bpt3 6mo ago
        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.
        sarchertech 6mo ago
        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 family of those 10 people has evidence you created the conditions to cause the explosion in order to benefit your company, you're probably going to lose in civil court. Linus benefits from the increase velocity of people using AI. He doesn't get to put all the liability on the people contributing.
        bpt3 6mo ago
        That is a nonsensical analogy on multiple levels, and doesn't even support your own argument.
    - Cytobit 6mo ago
      That's not going to shield the Linux organization.
      - cxr 6mo ago
        A DCO bearing a claim of original authorship (or assertion of other permitted use) isn't going to shield them entirely, but it can mitigate liability and damages.
        sarchertech 6mo ago
        Can it though? As far as I know this hasn’t been tested.
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
    - aargh_aargh 6mo ago
      The practical concern of Linux developers regarding responsibility is not being able to ban the author, it's that the author should take ongoing care for his contribution.
  - Andrex 6mo ago
    Let me introduce you to the concept of submarine patents...
- martin-t 6mo ago
  As opposed to an irregular person? LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is a massive hack causing massive issues such as using corporate finances for political gain). A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has limitations in both time and memory available, a model of text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have any relevance. Just because a human can do something does not mean machines run by corporations should be able to do it en-masse. The rules of copyright allow humans to do certain things because: - Learning enriches the human. - Once a human consumes information, he can't willingly forget it. - It is impossible to prove how much a human-created intellectual work is based on others. With LLMs: - Training (let's not anthropomorphize: lossily-compressing input data by detecting and extracting patterns) enriches only the corporation which owns it. - It's perfectly possible to create a model based only on content with specific licenses or only public domain. - It's possible to trace every single output byte to quantifiable influences from every single input byte. It's just not an interesting line of inquiry for the corporations benefiting from the legal gray area.
  - afro88 6mo ago
    Dude come on, I clearly wasn't saying LLMs are people. My point was it's a tool and it's the responsibility of the person wielding it to check outputs. If it's too hard to check outputs, don't use the tool. Your arguments about copyright being different for LLMs: at the moment that's still being defined legally. So for now it's an ethical concern rather than a legal one. For what it's worth I agree that LLMs being trained on copyright material is an abuse of current human oriented copyright laws. There's no way this will just continue to happen. Megacorps aren't going to lie down if there's a piece of the pie on the table, and then there's precedent for everyone else (class action perhaps)
    - martin-t 6mo ago
      Alright, I did make that assumption because I've seen and heard people talk about LLM as people. It worries me that otherwise functional and reasonable people, some of them my friends, have been so easily been convinced by a machine which demonstrated its flaws to me daily. As for checking outputs - I don't believe that's sufficient. Maybe the letter of the law is flawed but according to the spirit the model itself is derivative work. A model takes several orders of magnitude more work as training data than it takes to code the training algorithm itself, to any reasonable and sane person, that makes it a derivative work of the training data by nearly 100% - we can only argue how many nines it should be. > precedent Yeah but the US system makes me very uneasy about it. The right way to do this is to sit down, talk about the options and their downstream implications, talking about fairness and justice and then deciding what the law should be. If we did that, copyright law would look very different in the first place and this whole thing would have an obvious solution.
- rzmmm 6mo ago
  In certain law cases plagiarization can be influenced by the fact if person is exposed to the copyrighted work. AI models are exposed to very large corpus of works..
  - cxr 6mo ago
    Copyright infringement and plagiarism are not the same or even very closely related. They're different concepts and not interchangeable. Relative to copyright infringement, cases of plagiarism are rarely a matter for courts to decide or care about at all. Plagiarism is primarily an ethical (and not civil or criminal) matter. Rather than be dealt with by the legal system, it is the subject of codes of ethics within e.g. academia, journalism, etc. which have their own extra-judicial standards and methods of enforcement.
    - dekhn 6mo ago
      I suspect they were instead referring to patents; for example, when I worked at Google, they told the engineers not to read patents because then the engineer might invent something infringing, I think it's called willful infringement. No other employer I've worked for has every raised this as an issue, while many lawyers at google would warn against this.
    - martin-t 6mo ago
      You're right, legally speaking. But you shouldn't be right. I mean, morally. The law is a compromise between what the people in power want and what they can get away with without people revolting. It has nothing to do with morality, fairness or justice. And we should change that. The promise of democracy was (among other things) that everyone would be equal, everybody would get to vote and laws would be decided by the moral system of the majority. And yet, today, most people will tell you they are unhappy about the rising cost of living and rising inequality... The law should be based on complete and consistent moral system. And then plagiarism (taking advantage of another person's intellectual work without credit or compensation) would absolutely be a legal matter.
panzi 6mo ago
If the output is public domain it's fine as I understand it.
- galaxyLogic 6mo ago
  Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ? Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
  - robinsonb5 6mo ago
    > Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong? You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish. The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.
    - cwnyth 6mo ago
      This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it, copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public domain for someone else to do something with. If I use public domain code in a project under a license, the whole work remains under the license, but not the public domain code. I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.
      - manwe150 6mo ago
        If someone else uses your exact same prompt to generate the exact same code, can you claim copyright infringement against them? If the output is possible to copyright, then you could claim their prompt is infringement (just like if it reproduced Harry Potter). If it isn’t copyrightable, then the kernel would not have legal standing to enforce the GPL on those lines of code against any future AI reproduction of them. The developers might need to show that the code is licensed under GPL and only GPL, otherwise there is the possibility the same original contributor (eg the AI) did permit the copy. The GPL is an imposed restriction on what the kernel can legally do with any code contributions. That seems legally complicated for some projects—probably not the kernel with the large amount of pre-AI code, but maybe it spells trouble for smaller newer projects if they want to sue over infringement. IANAL.
noosphr 6mo ago
Tab complete does not produce copyrightable material either. Yet we don't require software to be written in nano.
- rpdillon 6mo ago
  This is a nice point that I haven't seen before. It's interesting to regress AI to the simplest form and see how we treat it as a test for the more complex cases.
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
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 contributor simply state that you are making the contribution and that you are not infringing on other people's work with that contribution under the GPLv2. And you document the fact that you used AI for transparency reasons. There is a lot of legal murkiness around how training data is handled, and the output of the models. Or even the models themselves. Is something that in no way or shape resembles a copyrighted work (i.e. a model) actually distributing that work? The legal arguments here will probably take a long time to settle but it seems the fair use concept offers a way out here. You might create potentially infringing work with a model that may or may not be covered by fair use. But that would be your decision. For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use.
- ninjagoo 6mo ago
  IANAL; this is what my limited understanding of the matter is. With that caveat: it is easy to forget that copyright is on output- verbatim or exact reproductions and derivatives of a covered work are already covered under copyright. So if the AI outputs Starry Night or Starry Night in different color theme, that's likely infringement without permission from van Gogh, who would have recourse against someone, either the user or the AI provider. But a starry-night style picture of an aquarium might not be infringing at all. >For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use. I would argue that if it was a verbatim reproduction of a copyrighted piece of software, that would likely be infringing. But if it was similar only in style, with different function names and structure, probably not infringing. Folks will argue that some things might be too small to do any different, for example a tiny snippet like python print("hello") or 1+1=2 or a for loop in your example. In that case it's too lacking in original expression to qualify for copyright protection anyway.
Tomte 6mo ago
There is already lots and lots of non-GPL code in the kernel, under dozens of licenses, see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/package-analysis/refs/heads/main/analysed-packages/linux/version-6.1.58/linux-6.1.58-OSS-disclosure.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/pac... As long as everything is GPLv2-compatible it‘s okay.

shevy-java 6mo ago

But why should AI then be attributed if it is merely a tool that is used?

yrds96 6mo ago
AI tools can do the entire job from finding the problem, implementing and testing it. It's different from the regular single purpose static tools.
plmpsu 6mo ago
it makes sense to keep track of what model wrote what code to look for patterns, behaviors, etc.
streetfighter64 6mo ago
It isn't? > AI agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags. Only humans can legally certify the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). They mention an Assisted-by tag, but that also contains stuff like "clang-tidy". Surely you're not interpreting that as people "attributing" the work to the linter?
lonelyasacloud 6mo ago
Having an honesty based tag could be only way to monitor impact or get after a fix in code bases if things go south. That is at the moment: - Nobody knows for sure what agents might add and their long term effects on codebases. - It's at best unclear that AI content in a codebase can be reliably determined automatically. - Even if it's not malicious, at least some of its contributions are likely to be deleterious and pass undetected by human review.
hgoel 6mo ago
This is a good point but I'd take it in the opposite direction from the implication, we should document which tools were used in general, it'd be a neat indicator of what people use.

pibaker 6mo ago

I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place. I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call them out they just blame it on the AI coding tools they are using as if they are not opening PRs under their own names. I can't blame any open source maintainer for being at least a little sceptical when it comes to AI generated contributions.

theptip 6mo ago
I think them stating this very simple policy should also be read as them explicitly not making a more restrictive policy, as some kernel maintainers were proposing.
- Applejinx 6mo ago
  From everything I'm seeing in the industry (I'm basically a noncoder choosing to not use AI in the stuff that I make, and privy to the private work experience of coders and creators also in that field because of human social contacts), I feel like I can shed a bit of light. It looks to me like a more restrictive policy will be flat-out impossible. Even people I trust are going along with this stuff, akin to CAD replacing drafting. Code is logic as language, and starting with web code and rapidly metastasizing to C++ (due to complexity and the sheer size of the extant codebase, good and bad) the AI has turned slop-coding to a 'solved problem'. If you don't mean to do the best possible thing or a new thing there is no excuse for existing as a coder in the world of AI. If you do expect to do a new thing or a best thing, in theory you're required to put out the novel information as AI cannot reach it until you've entered it into the corpus of existing code the AI's built on. However, if you're simply recombining existing aspects of the code language in a novel way, that might be more reachable… that's probably where 'AI escape velocity' will come from should it occur. In practice, everybody I know is relegating the busywork of coding to AI. I don't feel social pressure to do the same but I'm not a coder. I'm something else that produces MIT-licensed codebases for accomplishing things that aren't represented in code AS code, rather it's for accomplishing things that are specific and experiential. I write code to make specific noises I'm not hearing elsewhere, and not hearing out of the mainstream of 'sound-making code artifacts'. Therefore, it's impractical for Linux to take any position forbidding AI-assisted code. People will just lie and claim they did it. Is primitive tab-complete also AI? Where's the line? What about when coding tools uniformly begin to tab-complete with extensive reasoning and code prototyping? I already see this in the JetBrains Rider editor I use for Godot hacking, even though I've turned off everything I can related to AI. It'll still try to tab-complete patterns it thinks it recognizes, rarely with what I intend. And so the choice is to enforce responsibility. I think this is appropriate because that's where the choices will matter. Additions and alterations will be the responsibility of specific human people, which won't handle everything negative that's happening but will allow for some pressures and expectations that are useful. I don't think you can be a collaborative software project right now and not deal with this in some way. I get out of it because I'm read-only: I'm writing stuff on a codebase that lives on an antique laptop without internet access that couldn't run AI if it tried. Very likely the only web browsers it can run are similarly unable to handle 2026 web pages, though I've not checked in years. You've only got my word for that, though, and your estimation of my veracity based on how plausible it seems (I code publically on livestreams, and am not at all an impressive coder when I do that). Linux can't do what I do, so it's going to do what Linux does, and this seems the best option.

lrvick 6mo ago

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.

ebbi 6mo ago
True - on Mastodon there is a very vocal crowd that are against AI in general, and are identifying Linux distros that have AI generated code with the view of boycotting it.
- lrvick 6mo ago
  Soon they will have to boycott all of them. Then what I wonder?
cinntaile 6mo ago
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.
- goatlover 6mo ago
  Are they against change in general, or certain kinds of change? Remember when social media was seen as near universal good kind of progress? Not so much now.
  - contraposit 6mo ago
    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.
    - dwedge 6mo ago

oompydoompy74 6mo ago

I wish everyone could be so rational, well reasoned, and balanced on this subject.