Has anyone thought about what AI code does to the license of each file it’s used in?
If AI code can’t be copyrighted does it also follow that it can’t be protected by copyleft rules?
Do I have to make ai source available when I reuse some part of it in my project?
This should be a real concern for commercial software, maybe not Linux, but all the vibe coding game studios should lose copyrights on things that AI codes.
I have also been thinking about this, because as far as I know you're correct - at least under US copyright law, AI output is not copyrightable, and since you don't own it you can't license it. All AI code is public domain (again, at least in the US). It's surprising to me that there has been little discussion about this, and Linus himself has not addressed it
As some one here summarised it: it is to stop AI companies from getting free advertisement and endorsement, the kernel itself goes through an unbelievable amount of scrutiny so the disclosure requirement was irrelevant
That would be solved by removing public mentions of ai companies in the ai disclosure notice.
What would be the point of jumping through these hoops in the first place? As OP pointed out, the disclosure requirement is itself irrelevant due to the amount of scrutiny the code goes through. So we're forcing disclosure to... shame AI users? Discourage its use?
The code, or parts of the code, may not be under copyright, but why does that matter? I suppose in the rare cases when it leaks we could freely use the AI generated parts of it, but how do you untangle the AI stuff from the human written stuff? It’s a minefield for a for-profit company. And for the open source community it doesn’t really matter since AI can reverse engineer pretty much any game now and generate copyright free code from it.
If the use and inclusion of LLM derived output is truly defensible, why would you need to conceal its provenance or existence?
The debasement and solvency of competency wrought by the unbridled abdication to responsibility to such an incompetent construct is beyond depressing, this Is truly a world no longer worth inhabiting.
The question is why it matters in the first place. As long as the person submitting code takes ownership of the code, and there is a review of the code being done the same as before, nothing actually changes. Your whole line of argument is absurd because it's premised on the idea that we can trust code produced by a human more than code produced by an LLM. And that's obviously not true because humans make mistakes all the time. So, the focus on how the code was produced is fundamentally misguided. The focus in any successful project is on validation through things like code reviews, specifications, testing, and other well established practices. That's what responsible teams have always done.
To me, it matters because the use and reliance on LLMs demonstrably erodes cognitive capacity and ability, and submissions tainted by them should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, which can only be facilitated with a consummate element of transparency. That elevated scrutiny could, and probably should, also be applied to non-LLM infected submissions, but doing so wouldn’t negate the labelling of authorship.
Good faith proponents of LLM assisted tooling should be in favour of overt transparency and labelling, as it’s a requirement to facilitate future historical analysis of their utility, efficacy, and legitimacy; you know, to build a body of evidence.
I guess, as he suggested, it's time to fork it.
the hardest part is to come pu with a good project name and mascot.
I’ll say we go the opposite of a penguin - a polar bear. And then go the way of Open Office and call it Librux.
I’m sure that will catch on
I find this exceptionally upsetting.
This decision baffles me.
Can we as the tech community stop dick riding Linus and accept that he sold out to big tech?
100%, just don't worship anyone and have some personality / spine.
It would be interesting if this results in Linux being forked or perhaps even more interesting developers and users opposed to AI moving to GNU Hurd or any of the BSD variants.
jesus christ... it's been said over a million times, the development of the linux kernel is not some fucking 5 star github repo. it goes through a shit ton of review, it's seen by a lot of eyes. a small piece of text that says it was assisted or not by ai is irrelevant if the code is good or not, which is the work of maintainers to decide.
It's seen by a lot of eyes
Wonder how long before the code review is also offloaded to AI and Linux kernel becomes a black box with not even Linus himself knowing well enough how it works and what it does.
I don't understand. Being moral is irrelevant?
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
but why remove it ?
According to Linus it's free advertising for the AI companies (wowe look at how much code Claude (partially) committed buy le Anthropic now!) and also people don't disclose all their other tools either so this is just an exception which can be removed. And I bet there's going to be a ton of LLM based reviewing on all code that's submitted to double check for potential bugs anyway.
Anyone who is allowed to work in the Linux kernel isn't going to (be allowed to) push random slop.
Because rules have to be enforced, and investing time and effort into detecting and punishing rule-breakers would be a pointless endeavor when, disclosure/AI or not, all code has to be reviewed anyway.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
