AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

Can't really blame people for reducing their level of effort. It's very easy to put in a lot of effort and end up with absolutely nothing to show for it. Before AI came along, my realization was that begging the maintainers to implement the features I wanted was the right move. They have all the context and can do it better than us in a fraction of the time it'd take us to do it. Actually cloning someone else's repository and working on it should only be attempted if one is willing to literally fork it and own the project should things go south. Now that we have AI, it's actually possible to easily understand and modify complex codebases, and I simply cannot find the will to blame people for using it to the fullest extent. Getting the AI to maintain the fork is really easy too.

I don't think it's insane. It seems reasonable that people could disagree about how much attribution and disclosure there should be about AI assistance, or if it's even allowed, etc.

Every document in that `process` directory explains stuff that could be obvious to some people but not others.

What's missed is that neither contributors nor maintainers are usually paid for their effort and nobody has standing to demand that they do anything they are not doing already. Don't like a messy vibe coded PR but need functionality? Then clean it up yourself and send improved version for review. Or let it be unmerged. But don't assign work to others you don't employ.

On the other hand, companies like NVIDIA should be publicly taken to task for changing their mind about instruction set for every new GPU and then not supporting them properly in popular inference engines, they certainly have enough money to hire people who will learn vLLM inside out and ensure high quality patches.

It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts.

Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored.

I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

Plenty see {{some_woodworker}} as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled table saw cuts is actually allowed to be used in furniture making.

The worst part about all reactionary scares is that, because the behaviors are driven by emotion and feeling as opposed to any intentional course of action, the outcomes are usually counter productive. The current AI scare is exactly what you would want if you are OpenAI. Convince OSS, not to mention "free" software people, to run around dooming and ant milling each other about "AI bad" and pretty soon OSS is a poisonous minefield for any actual open AI, so OSS as a whole just sabotages itself and is mostly out of the fight.

I'm currently in the middle of trying to blow straight past this gatekeepy outer layer of the online discourse. What is a bit frustrating is knowing that while the seed will find the niches and begin spreading through invisible channels, in the visible channels, there's going to be all kinds of knee-jerk pushback from these anti-AI hardliners who can't distinguish between local AI and paying Anthropic for a license to use a computer. Worse, they don't care. The social psychosis of being empowered against some "others" is more important. Either that or they are bots.

And all of this is on top of what I've been saying for over a year. VRAM efficiency will kill the datacenter overspend. Local, online training will make it so that skilled users get better models over time, on their own data. Consultative AI is the future.

I have to remind myself that this entire misstep is a result of a broken information space, late-stage traditional social, filled with people (and "people") who have been programmed for years on performative clap-backs and middling ideas.

So fortunate to have some life before internet perspective to lean back on. My instinct and old-world common sense can see a way out, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch the online discourse essentially blinding itself while doubling down on all this hand wringing to no end, accomplishing nothing more than burning a few witches and salting their own lands. You couldn't want it any better if you were busy entrenching.

The linux foundation itself, is just one big, woke, leftist mess, with CV-stuffers from corporations in every significant position.

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.

As long as everything is GPLv2-compatible it‘s okay.

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.

It's different from the regular single purpose static tools.

> 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?

If you didn't want to be credited you should have said.

Signed-off-by probably has some legal weight. When you add that to code you are making a clear statement about the origins of the code and that you have legal authority to contribute it - for example, that you asked your company for permission if needed. As far as I know none of this has been tested in court, but it seems reasonable to assume it might be one day.

However, there is no legal precedent that says that because contributors sign a DCO and retain copyright, the Linux Foundation is not liable. The entire concept is unproven.

Large company legal departments aren’t a shield against this kind of thing. Patent trolls routinely go after huge companies and smaller companies routinely sue much larger ones over copyright infringement.

2. Infringement in closed source code isn’t as likely to be discovered

3. OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise agreements agree to indemnify (pay for damages essentially) companies for copyright issues.

I've worked at a company that was asked as part of a merger to scan for code copied from open source. That ended up being a major issue for the merger. People had copied various C headers around in odd places, and indeed stolen an odd bit of telnet code. We had to go clean it up.

Linus makes $1.5 million per year from the Linux foundation. And the foundation itself pulls in $300 million a year in revenue.

They are directly benefiting from contributors and if they cause harm through their actions there’s a good chance they’ll be held liable.

But a human just using an LLM to generate code will do it accidentally. The difference is that regurgitation of training text is a documented failure mode of LLMs.

And there’s no way for the human using it to be aware it’s happening.

The whole use it but if it behaves as expected, it’s your fault is a ridiculous stance.

I'm not talking about maintainability or reliability. I'm talking about legal culpability.

Language models do generate character for character existing code on which they are trained on . The training corpus usually contain code which is only source available but is not FOSS licensed .

Generated does not automatically mean novel or new the bar needed for IP.

[1] Even this is not definitely ruled in courts or codified in IP law and treaties yet .

...and then people start going "that's AI" on every single piece of code, seeing AI generated code left and right - like normal people claim every other picture, video or piece of text is "AI".

IMO it's a lot better to let people just openly say "this code was generated with AI assistance", but still sign off on it. Because "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/

Certainly not if it had seen the code (incl. having been trained on it).

The idea of clean room (dating back to IBM PC BIOS clones) is that ideas can't be copyright, but the expression of an idea (code) can be, so you have one person (or AI) write a spec of the thing you want to copy (expression -> idea) and then have another (in the "clean room") who has never seen the original code, and only seen the spec/idea, re-implement it.

If the re-implementation was being done with AI, then for this to pass as "clean room" it would need to be proved that the AI had never seen the code, only the spec.

Remember kids never get your legal advice from hn comments.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain

Yes.

I have 2 issues with "post-scarcity":

- It often implicitly assumes humanity is one homogeneous group where this state applies to everyone. In reality, if post-scarcity is possible, some people will be lucky enough to have the means to live that lifestyle while others will still by dying of hunger, exposure and preventable diseases. All else being equal, I'd prefer being in the first group and my chance for that is being economically relevant.

- It often ignores that some people are OK with having enough while others have a need to have more than others, no matter how much they already have. The second group is the largest cause of exploitation and suffering in the world. And the second group will continue existing in a post-scarcity world and will work hard to make scarcity a real thing again.

---

Back to your question:

I made the mistake of publishing most of my public code under GPL or AGPL. I regret is because even though my work has brought many people some joy and a bit of my work was perhaps even useful, it has also been used by people who actively enjoy hurting others, who have caused measurable harm and who will continue causing harm as long as they're able to - in a small part enabled by my code.

Permissive licenses are socially agnostic - you can use the work and build on top of it no matter who you are and for what purpose.

A(GPL) is weakly pro-social - you can use the work no matter what but you can only build on top of it if you give back - this produces some small but non-zero social pressure (enforced by violence through governments) which benefits those who prefer cooperation instead of competition.

What I want is a strongly pro-social license - you can use or build on top of my work only if you fulfill criteria I specify such as being a net social good, not having committed any serious offenses, not taking actions to restrict other people's rights without a valid reason, etc.

There have been attempts in this direction[0] but not very successful.

In a world without LLMs, I'd be writing code using such a license but more clearly specified, even if I had to write my own. Yes, a layer would do a better job, that does not mean anything written by a non-lawyer is completely unenforceable.

With LLMs, I have stopped writing public code at all because the way I see it, it just makes people much richer than me even richer at a much faster rate than I can ever achieve myself. Ir just makes inequality worse. And with inequality, exploitation and oppression tends to soon follow.

[0]: https://json.org/license.html

Nope, there is no “The” Turing Test. Go read his original paper before parroting pop sci nonsense.

The Turing test paper proposes an adversarial game to deduce if the interviewee is human. It’s extremely well thought out. Seriously, read it. Turing mentions that he’d wager something like 70% of unprepared humans wouldn’t be able to correctly discern in the near future. He never claims there to be a definitive test that establishes sentience.

Turing may have won that wager (impressive), but there are clear tells similar to the “how many the r’s are in strawberries?” that an informed interrogator could reliably exploit.

It should be either something like "(partially/completely) generated by" or if you want to include deterministic tools, then "Tools-used:".

The Turing test is an interesting thought experiment but we've seen it's easy for LLMs to sound human-like or make authoritative and convincing statements despite being completely wrong or full of nonsense. The Turing test is not a measure of intelligence, at least not an artificial one. (Though I find it quite amusing to think that the point at which a person chooses to refer to LLMs as intelligence is somewhat indicative of his own intelligence level.)

> whether these things are actually sentient or not is of no pragmatic importance if we can't distinguish their output from a sentient creature, especially when it comes to programming

It absolutely makes a difference: you can't own a human but you can own an LLM (or a corporation which is IMO equally wrong as owning a human).

Humans have needs which must be continually satisfied to remain alive. Humans also have a moral value (a positive one - at least for most of us) which dictates that being rendered unable to remain alive is wrong.

Now, what happens if LLMs have the same legal standing as humans and are thus able to participate in the economy in the same manner?

"GPL-2.0-only" "GPL-2.0 only"