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.

Since most corporate software is closed proprietary software, there traditionally wasn’t a lot of opportunities for an open-source project to even have the ability copy code, except in instances of a source code leak or perhaps the odd ex-employee. Back in the day, developers would do clean-room designs to avoid being sued for infringement. A famous example is the development of the PC compatible Compaq BIOS.

In comparison, every LLM on the market now is able to inject copyrighted code into any project, completely unknowingly to the contributor or the project. It’s such a recent issue with the introduction of this technology, there likely hasn’t been too many court cases on it yet.

If a FLOSS project was sued in the future over this, personally I think being able to point to a policy that completely rejects contributions from a known source of copyright infringement would give them a better legal defense compared to a project that explicitly says not to inform them of any use of a known copyright infringing tool. This is also why WINE has hard rules to not allow anyone who has ever seen Windows source code, either leaked or from working at MS, to ever contribute to the WINE project, as then if anyone submitted some source code anyway, they can point to their policy as a legal defense.

Unfortunately, OpenMandriva’s president (warning, lunduke link as evidence) has declared the project “non-woke” and “anti-DEI”, which has resulted in it attracting a hard right community.

Unfortunately, OpenMandriva’s president (warning, lunduke link as evidence) has declared the project “non-woke” and “anti-DEI”, which has resulted in it attracting a hard right community.

TIL!

(though personally I don’t consider Elementary’s Pantheon desktop a ‘major’ DE, since it’s only used by 1 other obscure distro besides Elementary according to distrowatch, and AFAIK elementary itself isn’t super popular. Still, cool to know!).

Did you mean to have that be a response to a different comment?

The Apertus Swiss AI unfortunately doesn’t seem to live up to its claims, and they have been silent on the issue brought up there. I honestly suspect the same of IBM’s Granite, but have not investigated.

They have not, they do accept AI contributions, however their policy is a bit more restrictive than Debian’s in that Fedora at least requires contributors to disclose LLM use in pull requests.

There are a few distros that do reject all AI code, which you can find in these two lists:

https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#linux-based (under the ‘Alternative Linux-based operating systems’ section).

There’s some serious concerns with corporate AI that, IMO, make it a no-go under almost any scenario.

But if we ignore those and instead focus purely on self-hosted AI, we’re still going to run into some roadblocks :\

Unfortunately, there does not currently exist a self-hosted LLM model that wasn’t trained unethically on copyrighted code (the ones that do claim to be ethical have not lived up to that claim).

Realistically, even with an unethically trained local LLM, I don’t think using the available self-hosted LLMs to try to find bugs in some code is terribly unethical or damaging, that’s probably the only use-case I would sign-off on within a FLOSS project. I also don’t think it would matter too much if someone wanted to use a self-hosted AI to code some changes to a personal project, like modding an old C64 game source code with some new features. Go for it.

But once we start getting into distributing software, or contributing code to existing FLOSS projects, none of the current models are safe to use, as they all are prone to generating parts of the copyrighted code they were trained on (potentially each prompt can have a 3 to 10% chance of generating a perfect copy of copyrighted code). That is a legal minefield waiting to be stepped on, and could be disastrous for projects that accept a large portion of LLM code, as it may become unfeasible to re-write that code, or to survive a legal battle from a company claiming damages.

It’s also quite unsettled on whether or not LLM output can even be copyrighted at all, stripping any LLM generated code of the ability to be protected with copyleft licenses like the GPL (this would in effect allow companies to take FLOSS project and close source it, using the free labor of the project, but without any ability for the FLOSS project to do the same back, it would be a one-way pillaging).

Until there’s a a truly ethical and non-infringing self-hosted LLM available, there really is no middle ground for a FLOSS project to take. And if/when one is available, there will still be a concern of skill loss/critical thinking atrophy that seems to be likely with extended LLM use, like a sort’ve Wall-E effect (example 1, example 2).

KDE’s policy proposal explicitly allowed for contributors to not disclose that AI was used, which according to the FSFe and Software Freedom Conservancy, is not a good idea in legal terms.

“FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these systems change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."

Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.

Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.

Not to mention the ethical and environmental concerns with corporate AI usage, the use of which KDE was not interested in attempting to curb within its own project, which personally I think was disappointing, and even their KDE Eco group stated the policy was incompatible with the goals of KDE being a green project.

Some people will absolutely lie, but I suspect most contributors will respect the rules, and ultimately cut down on AI PRs overall, as those AI contributors switch to projects who are pro-AI.

“Is the code good” is literally all that matters.

Only if one ignores the ethical, environmental, and copyright concerns.

Well then… I guess this old video turned out to be prophetic.

I wouldn’t go back if they re-enabled it, this place is better now, and isn’t supporting a user hostile mega corp.

That’s not insurmountable to learn, even something like watching Cody’s Labs videos on gold reclamation would be a good starting point.

Overall it would still be tricky to fully pull off without raising suspicion unless the amounts were kept consistently low, at least if you kept it to a 1 person operation.

If you started a gold mining company, hired people to run it legitimately, you could fudge the books on how much was actually mined, sifted, and processed, that probably wouldn’t get a close inspection.

Long term plan, but…

Begin legitimately prospecting a piece of land legally in Alaska, document that you do so, do some substantial digging/panning etc.

Melt a large bar down into much smaller amounts that are worth only around $500 to $1000 in weight. Sell the melted gold at a local gold precious metals dealer in small batches over the course of many months/years. Claim the profit on your taxes as spoils from your prospecting.

This technique would not work with huge amounts or quantities, and even as I described it, it may bring an audit, since it is likely most prospectors are not that successful.

Oh it’s wasting water and electricity? The water and electricity were already wasted by training, you can’t un-waste the water or electricity.

Water and electricity are wasted running the data centers on really inefficient power generators at the plant.

The last time I investigated Solus, there seemed to be difficulty getting a new ISO out (which admittedly was quite a while ago). However your AI policy announcement even says to bear in mind Solus is a “small team” (I assume to justify the use of AI?).

The other devs were generally against any form of disclosure, saying that they didn’t want to ‘shame’ developers who used it.

The discussion was locked and then removed from public view due to public backlash.

Solus mostly has just a skeleton crew left after the creater, Ikey Doherty, abandoned it suddenly. I personally didn’t think it’d be around long-term even before this new policy.

The most effective supplement with the biggest impact I’ve ever tried is plain old magnesium oxide (the expensive forms are a waste of money, and you’ll actually absorb less elemental magnesium from them. Just take the oxide form with a meal to avoid the shits).

It’s difficult to get enough magnesium in most diets, and I found that ensuring adequate magnesium intake had the effect of making my mind just feel sharper (that effect is especially prominent if you’re supplementing vitamin-D as well, since that tends to use up magnesium in its conversion process, IIRC).

nothing else has had such a noticeable, non-placebo benefit (except Vitamin D if you’re deficient, which will make you crazy depressed without getting sun or supplementing).