alt Hacker NewsAI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
Comments
> Signed-Off ...
> The human submitter is responsible for:
> Reviewing all AI-generated code
> Ensuring compliance with licensing requirements
> Adding their own Signed-off-by tag to certify the DCO
> Taking full responsibility for the contribution
> Attribution: ... Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following format:
I am sure that this was reviewed by attorneys before being published as policy, because of the copyright implications.
Hopefully this will set the trend and provide definitive guidance for a number of Devs that were not only seeing the utility behind ai assistance but also the acrimony from some quarters, causing some fence-sitting.
Glad to see the common-sense rule that only humans can be held accountable for code generated by AI agents.
This does nothing to shield Linux from responsibility for infringing code.
This is essentially like a retail store saying the supplier is responsible for eliminating all traces of THC from their hemp when they know that isn’t a reasonable request to make.
It’s a foreseeable consequence. You don’t get to grant yourself immunity from liability like this.
We've seen in the past, for instance in the world of compliance, that if companies/governments want something done or make a mistake, they just have a designated person act as scapegoat.
So what's preventing lawyers/companies having a batch of people they use as scapegoats, should something go wrong?
This is discussed in the Linus vs Linus interview, "Building the PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds". [0]
All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only
Am I being too pedantic if I point out that it is quite possible for code to be compatible with GPL-2.0 and other licenses at the same time? Or is this a term that is well understood?
inb4 people rage against Linux
> All contributions must comply with the kernel's licensing requirements:
I just don't think that's realistically achievable. Unless the models themselves can introspect on the code and detect any potential license violations.
If you get hit with a copyright violation in this scheme I'd be afraid that they're going to hammer you for negligence of this obvious issue.
> All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only
How can you guarantee that will happen when AI has been trained a world full of multiple licenses and even closed source material without permission of the copyright owners...I confirmed that with several AI's just now.
Sounds sensible.
At least it'll make it easy to audit and replace it all in a few years.
Fork the kernel!
Humans for humans!
Don't let skynet win!!!
Good. The BSDs should follow suit. It is unreasonable to expect any developer not to use AI in 2026.
Why does this file have an extension of .rst? What does that even mean for the fileformat?
This feels like the OSS community is giving up.
LLMs are lossily-compressed models of code and other text (often mass-scraped despite explicit non-consent) which has licenses almost always requiring attribution and very often other conditions. Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0].
The idea of intelligence being emergent from compression is nothing new[1]. The trick here is giving up on completeness and accuracy in favor of a more probabilistic output which
1) reproduces patterns and interpolates between patterns of training data while not always being verbatim copies
2) serves as a heuristic when searching the solution-space which is further guided by deterministic tools such as compilers, linters, etc. - the models themselves quite often generate complete nonsense, including making up non-existent syntax in well-known mainstream languages such as C#.
I strongly object to anthropomorphising text transformers (e.g. "Assisted-by"). It encourages magical thinking even among people who understand how the models operate, let alone the general public.
Just like stealing fractional amounts of money[3] should not be legal, violating the licenses of the training data by reusing fractional amounts from each should not be legal either.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356000
[1]: http://prize.hutter1.net/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
[3]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14925/has-a-pro...
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Linux has fallen. Linus Torvalds is now just another vibe coder. I give it less than a year, or maybe a month, until Linux gets vibe-coded patches approved by LLMs.
Open source is dead, having had its code stolen for use by vibe-coding idiots.
Make no mistake, this is the end of an era.
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.