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It might come to be that maintainers have to begin accepting llm-authored or llm-assisted contributions just to maintain control of the project. Otherwise user
by hackingonempty 3mo ago
It might come to be that maintainers have to begin accepting llm-authored or llm-assisted contributions just to maintain control of the project. Otherwise users will gravitate towards forks that offer the functionality they want.
- worble 3mo agoThey very specifically do not accept AI contributions because there is no way to tell if it's just regurgitating parts of the various Windows source code leaks from over the years ad-hoc, which would be a very costly mistake to make if Microsoft were feeling litigious.
- hackingonempty 3mo agoMore reason to ditch C, C++, and C#!
- cwillu 3mo agoThe language wine is written in is irrelevant, the source is still tainted.
- Chaosvex 3mo agoOn the other hand, it'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that'd play out. The ramifications could be huge.
- cwillu 3mo agoFor reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
- cedws 3mo agoTech companies shouldn’t be able have it both ways and say that copyright doesn’t apply to LLM-generated code only when it benefits them.
- bigstrat2003 3mo agoAnd yet, they likely will be able to. The law doesn't have much hold on the rich.
- Ferret7446 3mo agoThey likely won't, once precedent setting judgements start coming out
- charcircuit 3mo agoThat would be something Microsoft would have to prove in court and not that the AI came up with a similar approach on its own. ReactOS never got sued despite its similarity to Window's code. Also not all Wine code is related to reverse engineering.
- shakna 3mo agoThey might not have been sued, but ReactOS was certainly threatened. There was a large audit to ensure nothing was infringing. [0] [0] https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit
- timschmidt 3mo agoThe remedy for unintentional infringement is generally to remove the infringing code and cease distribution. That used to be a serious issue when rewriting the offending code might take years. But these days? Rewriting any offending code is a matter of specifying the interfaces and setting Claude / Codex to work. Risk of incorporating derived code might go up with accepting LLM submissions, but cost of recovering from them seems to have dropped accordingly, at least on the technical side.
- m4rtink 3mo agoReplace one set of LLM tainted code by a different bunch of LLM tainted code - perfect a and totally solid from any legal perspective! (The paragraph above is a sarcasm.)
- 15155 3mo agoIs this concept of "LLM tainted" enumerated in a statute or potentially borne out of actual case law somewhere?
- timschmidt 3mo agoPerhaps you've never maintained any serious open source software. A line-by-line source code audit for license compliance including some ripping-out and re-writing of non-compliant code was the first thing I did when taking over maintainership of Repsnapper nearly 20 years ago. Was required to get it into Fedora. I don't see how the presence of LLM generated code changes that kind of work at all.
- mostlysimilar 3mo agoOr it might come to be that rejecting LLM-authored or LLM-assisted contributions becomes a badge of quality, and users gravitate to them to avoid buggy, inconsistent, or non-performant versions of the same software.
- PalmPilotProMax 3mo agoThe allure of being just good enough where the bling and hype of features outshine hidden bugs may win out socially.
- cwillu 3mo agoThere's no need to guess, the reasoning is clearly laid out: “Don't use an LLM tool to generate code. There's no guarantee that the training material of that LLM respects our Clean Room Guidelines, or that its output is compatible with the LGPL.” --https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
- Krssst 3mo agoDoesn't wine have various rules to remain a white-room implementation? Not sure using LLMs which have possibly been trained on leaked Windows sources would be compatible with that. But that's just speculation, I wonder if LLMs possibly using leaked sources for training has been looked into. (probably legally difficult as the investigator would have to access the leaked sources too...)
- m4rtink 3mo agoNot sure if those fork would be maintainable long term if their authors need to lean so heavily on LLMs just to get their coding done. Would bet more on the original project that have demonstrated they know what they are doing & can do the work by themselves (if at more realistic pace).