Hi,
Thorsten Glaser wrote:
Justification: code and/or documentation probably non-free
Our friends from Gentoo have uncovered this:
https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/114835815375250264
In the linked-to article, the rsyslog author admits to having
used so-called “AI” over the past 24 (!) months. This means that
the code and/or documentation in recent releases is very likely
non-free, as it’s created by mechanically transforming existing
works without honouring their licences, and without even the
possibility of auditing.
This makes recent releases of rsyslog not suitable for main,
especially not as default syslogd implementation.
I don't agree with the claim, but note that seems to be controversial.
However this affects various other code bases as well, for example src:linux[1]:
| As an example, he pointed to a patch credited to him that was merged
| for the 6.15 release. That patch was entirely written by an LLM,
| changelog included.
and
| Another example is the git-resolve script that was merged for 6.16.
| This script, which came out of a late 2024 discussion on ambiguous
| commit IDs, will resolve an ambiguous (or even incorrect) ID into a
| full commit. It, too, was generated with an LLM. Not only does it
| work, but it includes a full set of self tests, something he noted
| (with understatement) is unusual for code found in the kernel's
| scripts directory. LLMs, he said, ""won't give you a frowny face""
| when asked to generate tests. The script includes documentation
| (also unusual for that directory), and is being used on a daily
| basis in the kernel community.
which suggests that code with test coverage and/or documentation is
especially suspect ;-)
I would expect compilers, larger libraries, GUI stuff to include code
and/or documentation generated by LLMs as well by now. And this will
likely only increase. So even replacing src:linux with kFreeBSD is not
a working exit strategy if LLM generated code was a copyright
violation. (And presumably FreeBSD will have the same going on anyway.)
Ansgar
[1]:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1026558/
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