I have used the new template below to show how it looks. We can add more details to the linked CONTRIBUTING.md in the pop repo.
I have not included any LLM (also known as AI) generated content in...
As far as code quality and reliability goes for mature projects like KDE and Linux, I trust the maintainers to know what they are doing. I have no place second-guessing them. If they think LLM usage disclosures are useful I believe them, if they feel otherwise I accept that as well. To me as an end user, it makes no difference. I’m not going to stop using Linux or KDE over LLM-assisted code contributions either way.
As far as copyright-ability, I could be convinced here. I’m not a legal expert at all, but it seems pretty speculative. I did read your first link, which is interesting. The legal risks as I understand them are:
A judge somewhere might say “This long-lived project has recently merged some patches which, to some unspecified and unknowable degree, involved LLM usage and therefore the GPL license indicated for this project is no longer valid. Therefore, the project is now Public Domain and it may be used and modified without releasing the changes.” Seems unlikely to me, but who really knows?
and probably much more likely:
A patch is accepted that replicates copyrighted code exactly, putting an unwitting maintainer in jeopardy. I looked around for examples of open source project maintainers being sued for this sort of infringement out of curiosity, but I really couldn’t find any. If this happens, I bet it’s typically handled outside of court with a C&D type situation.
Are there other legal risks I’m missing? I think it’s only a matter of time before some type of consensus for what the implications of the copyright questions are for FLOSS software.
Agree 100%, whether you allow AI coding assistants or not, will depend on the nature of the team and their QA processes.
At the end of the day, we should not prohibit people from using calculators instead of doing the math themselves. So long as the outcome quality is good, and the process is efficient.
As far as code quality and reliability goes for mature projects like KDE and Linux, I trust the maintainers to know what they are doing. I have no place second-guessing them. If they think LLM usage disclosures are useful I believe them, if they feel otherwise I accept that as well. To me as an end user, it makes no difference. I’m not going to stop using Linux or KDE over LLM-assisted code contributions either way.
As far as copyright-ability, I could be convinced here. I’m not a legal expert at all, but it seems pretty speculative. I did read your first link, which is interesting. The legal risks as I understand them are:
A judge somewhere might say “This long-lived project has recently merged some patches which, to some unspecified and unknowable degree, involved LLM usage and therefore the GPL license indicated for this project is no longer valid. Therefore, the project is now Public Domain and it may be used and modified without releasing the changes.” Seems unlikely to me, but who really knows?
and probably much more likely:
A patch is accepted that replicates copyrighted code exactly, putting an unwitting maintainer in jeopardy. I looked around for examples of open source project maintainers being sued for this sort of infringement out of curiosity, but I really couldn’t find any. If this happens, I bet it’s typically handled outside of court with a C&D type situation.
Are there other legal risks I’m missing? I think it’s only a matter of time before some type of consensus for what the implications of the copyright questions are for FLOSS software.
Agree 100%, whether you allow AI coding assistants or not, will depend on the nature of the team and their QA processes.
At the end of the day, we should not prohibit people from using calculators instead of doing the math themselves. So long as the outcome quality is good, and the process is efficient.