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.
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
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 if you got code from someone else, you'd probably want to credit it to them, right? So why shouldn't LLM output be treated the same?
LLM is a tool that a human uses, do you also credit your IDE when you write code?
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 assume you're citing a couple of studies with tiny samples that have been going around here. There's very little solid evidence to support the claim that LLMs demonstrably erode cognitive capacity. But if you have large scale, peer reviewed studies definitively showing this to be the case feel free to share them.
People lose certain skills working with LLMs, but that has always been the case with automation. Very few people know how to write assembly by hand, and practically nobody knows how to operate punch cards. Yet, we hardly claim that there was some loss of cognitive capacity as a result. People just spend their time focusing on different things now.
And I've already explained to you why the focus on the tooling is deeply misguided. You ignored my points entirely, which tells me that you're not actually trying to have a discussion in good faith here yourself.
Who said anything about concealing it? Not making a disclaimer mandatory and concealing something are two different things.
From the point of view of a reviewer, the code of the PR is all that matters. You shouldn't look at who wrote the code or what tools they used.
If the code is slop, it does not matter that a human or an AI wrote it, it is slop. Same if the code does what it's supposed to do and has a high enough quality to pass review.
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?
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
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.
good luck with that. software development has changed and it will never be the same. you will not be able to achieve the level of security required without ai assistance, you can't beat a machine. and this is something you'll see everywhere and is the tip of exponential curve.
I feel like we are moving into the acceptance phase.
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.
I find this exceptionally upsetting.
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.
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