If it turns out that it gets ruled as copyright violations, you can bet your ass they're going to reform copyright law instead of rolling everything back.

I don't disagree that it is a risk, and I am trying to move toward projects that do have err on the side of avoiding that risk. I have NetBSD on my laptop, and when I get a little more comfortable with it, I intend to convert the other Linux installations I maintain.

BUT, I believe the BSDs already went through a situation where some of their source was possibly under restrictive copyright and rather than "rolling back", they "simply" identified the possibly infringing code and re-wrote those sections to have the same function (which can't be copyrighted) without sharing any creative expression (which is). So, even the projects that are taking the risk that an LLM (or other generative AI) generates infringing code might not have quite as much cleanup / lost effort as you describe.

Also, LLM out isn't automatically a derivative work of the training data. I'd have to dig through some other messages to find an exact quote from their documents, but I believe they (EDIT: the U.S. copyright office) said only output that is "significantly similar" to training data is potentially infringing. That does further limit the risk.

I still think it's too high of a risk because well-meaning contributors might incorrectly introduce infringing code, since for models that don't disclose their training data (Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.) even dedicated contributors don't have the information they need to discover the output is infringing. In that past, that result (introducing infringing code) was generally limited to the acts of malicious actors that are submitting code they know to be infringing to poison a project and open it to legal action.

But, I can't ask that someone (i.e. a project maintainer) substitute my risk/reward judgement for theirs, and I have no experience maintaining a large project. All of my code contributions are to either projects others maintain, or my own hobby projects that I doubt have any users other than myself (and I don't even use all the published/available ones anymore).

Few? Do you have some example, maybe two?

i think the copyright question is still unanswered: it could turn out that any LLM-generated code is a copyright violation by definition unless trained exclusively on a clean, legitimately-obtained dataset (which few of the major models are).

I think this argument is BS, there are several remix/sample based albums that count as derived works and AFAIK, no one is getting paid.

It's answered, unless all big tech is going down suddenly, they are allowed, copyright violations are for the poor anyway.

Did you ever run CachyOS? I’m on it currently and I’ve been considering distro hopping to try an Atomic OS like Fedora Silverblue.

I tried Cosmic cause it looked interesting but had some issues in how game windows loaded so that kinda turned me off. Considering giving Nobara Noctalia a go.

Edit: got my N names mixed up

Did fedora make a stand against AI? If so, I might jump from Debian

IMO one of the major problems with LLm code generation is that it has the capacity to overwhelm human capacity to review code and properly understand the codebase.

From that perspective, a prohibitive policy doesn't have to be 100% effective to be useful, it just needs to slow things down enough to keep the manageable and maintainable (and fun to work on).

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.

and I wouldn’t be shocked if some contributors simply excise the “co-authored by ” from the commit messages

A simple mention of it in your agent instructions will also do it.

I admit I haven't followed the KDE AI debacle very closely, but as far as I understand KDE has not yet decided on an AI policy. Am I mistaken?

Edit:
From all primary sources I've been able to track down, nothing suggests an AI policy has been decided. This is the best explanation of the situation I've found so far, though it is a bit over a week old: https://planet.kde.org/nate-graham-2026-09-23-kde-and-ai-and-you-and-me/. If you have a primary source that says otherwise, please link it here, I'd like to know what their AI policy ends up being.

There's no need to excise anything unless you specifically let an agent create a commit. No need for pre-push hooks.

I think KDEs policy is quite rational, it's a compromise and still clearly anti-vibe coding. IMO the problems are overstated

Or you tell it not to commit but to suggest the commit message

For me it's the exact extreme opposite than your first point: The LLMs as death of copyright could be an actual food thing.

The issue im struggling with is the ecological and economic harm. It feels a bit as if the steam machine would've been invented but you'd throw in babies in addition to coal.

For the plus sides you're right (as in: I agree so it must be ;) )b- with one minor exception: the vibe coding part is not bad in itself. I actually used vibe coding as a very hard exercise: develop something and find ways to estimate its quality and performance but you are not allowed to look into the code! It's a fun brain teaser because it forces a pure outcome-perspective. The code itself is irrelevant for this, it's the mental training that's really interesting.

Oh except people who publish vibe coded stuff as a cool new project without disclaimer. Or as PRs. Or as ... Well anything where do see itself is actually important.

Have to think about this in an open source context. You have an open ended population ready to submit to your project if they think they can be useful

Now, thanks to GenAI, a bunch of people who aren't good at various things now thinks they are good at various things. Whether it's coding, making comics, making videos, what have you. Try to do nuance even if it strictly makes sense, and you are stuck with the slop problem if your project is sufficiently popular.

In terms of more directly on your points, if someone does GenAI to do a security analysis, ok, but I'd want them to do the tedium of trying to identify the false positives and then re-report it in their words of actual understanding. It can catch things, but along the way makes a haystack of sillyness to go through. Same for code review, legitimate issues, but lots of missing (I spent a non trivial amount of time yesterday because a GenAI code review insisted a variable would be unitialized when referenced, when I see an uncoditional assignment just a few lines above, trying to think if there was some catch I wasn't seeing). So indirectly using it and only subjecting the developer/maintainer to that which you know makes sense.

Problem being is that people have used Claude and have forwarded to me saying "I don't understand this well enough to judge, but forwarding to you just in case". I have the same tools doing the same things as you, I don't need meat proxies that just pass through the stuff without understanding.

It can actually do everything you mention, and under a watchful eye, generate reasonable code to spec. If you give it the architecture and requirements, it will make it as you see fit and generally faster than a skilled human.

But even beyond the theft, the resources required to do this are insane. The power and hardware needs are off the chart, and we're still paying for all this with Monopoly venture bucks.

Me interrogating the linux source code: "Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother."

Even if you don't disclose it it's immediately obvious to anyone with a brain that you haven't worked at all on it.

They just released an OLED laptop and cosmic has no sign of supporting HDR yet. They are so far behind, its kinda hard to see what they were trying to achieve. I wanted to like their stuff, but the hardware was really subpar for the price. To top that off, they don't "support" linux, they just ship it. I think they should mainline their drivers but I don't know a ton about kernel stuff 🤷‍♂️. Either way the result is they only support pop and Ubuntu which was disappointing.

I don't begrudge Cosmic or anything, it's just not what I want. I'm glad it exists.

KDE 4 was the TRULY bad release, if I recall correctly. It was a massive change from 3 and reduction in features and stability. I actually noped back over to Windows for a while as a result. I remember 5 being a welcome return to form comparatively.

EDIT: From the wikipedia Article on KDE4, oof:

KDE 4.0 was released in January 2008. Linux.com described the reaction from users as a "revolt", writing that the backlash KDE 4.0 received was on a scale that was unprecedented for a FOSS project. Although it was a developer's release, several distributions made the KDE 4.0 desktop environment available to their users without specifying that it was an experimental option. openSUSE released a more polished KDE 4 option while other distributions "released packages that simply [didn't] work," according to project leader Aaron Seigo. As a result, many users complained about the loss of features and stability. A number of KDE developers, including project leader Aaron Seigo, were targeted for abuse by outlets like Linux Hater's Blog. Several KDE developers stepped back from the public scrutiny.[36]

they released the first non-testing version of their new DE too soon.

This was the only issue I had with Cosmic. I don't know what the current state of the DE is these days, but surely they've fleshed out some bugs by now.

Also, cosmic-text is an amazing gift to the world, for what that's worth. Doesn't really justify using the DE, but that library is amazing.

I disagree that 5 was bad for most of its run. I think it was at about version 5.13 that I switched to it, having originally been a gnome 2.x user who hated Gnome3, but found KDE4.x unusable, and I've never regretted it a single time.

I'd struggle to remember any problem I have had with my system that I'd lay at the feet of KDE 5.

I'm not suggesting it's perfect and I'm sure some folks did have issues, but I never got the feeling I was one of a lucky few having a good experience with KDE5. KDE 4 - yes that was a frustratingly bad desktop experience, and I think it was widely regarded as such. But I strongly disagree on painting KDE5 with the same brush.

Cosmic supports both Tiling and Floating modes. The floating mode is normal, and the Tiling is slightly less customisable than pure tiling window managers but it's pretty good while staying accessible which is what matters.

Buddy a project to be successful doesn't need to a lot of users and fornsure doesn't need LLM

lookit nostradumass here

-projects that work

• projects that die from slop
• zombie projects held up by slopmongers

Thank Thor Linus is not a trend-seeking moron like the loudest 1% of open source is.