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Linus Torvalds to critics of AI coding in Linux: "Fork it. Or just walk away." (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [M] to c/news@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
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[–] 28 points 1 month ago (1 child)

It's a perfectly reasonable position: fork the kernel with a purist no-ai approach and see where it's going. It's literally what open-source is about. No need for a screaming contest, just do the thing you are convinced of and compete for the best solution.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    +1

    Proof is in the puddin’.

    If people think these specific guidelines will poison the kernel, well, let’s see if they do.

    If it happens, go back to or fork it from an earlier point.

    It honestly isn’t any different than previous kernel controversies.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Arent the issues with ai in the linux kernel ethical, not about code quality?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    It’s not linux’s job to be an ethical gatekeeper, within reason.

    Let me ask you this; if you’re from a certain country, from a certain background or whatever, should you not be allowed to contribute the kernel? Or submit a bug report?

    Devs of open source projects often find out others doing things they don’t like with their code. Or find major contributors have backgrounds they don’t like.

    Happens all the time; drama ensues. But at the end of the day a permissively licensed project is out there, the work on it is done by whoever’s already contributed. And the Linux project, in particular, is not in the business of trying to personally judge every entity behind the code contributions.

    I’d assert LLM agent usage is the same. Maintainers/reviewers don’t have to like LLMs, but it’s not really Linux’s job to judge who (or what) wrote the contribution; just if the code is good, or not.

    I’d argue a different policy is a bad precedent. It opens the door to judging people, too.

    And it’s also impractical. Contributors are going to use agents, so mind as well encourage them to attribute them rather than encouraging them to be unethical, and hiding it.

    Now, should LLMs be maintainers? Hell no.

    Should they blindly contribute code? Hell. No. Hence the policy requires a human to be responsible for it: https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    It’s not linux’s job to be an ethical gatekeeper

    Are people not allowed to complain when someone supports something that is unethical when they could easily not do that?

    if you’re from a certain country, from a certain background or whatever, should you not be allowed to contribute the kernel? Or submit a bug report?

    The people ruling the country are doing the unethical things, not the people that just happened to be born in the country, maybe fell victim to propaganda / Is it not normal to not allow someone to contribute to a project if they are currently doing problematic things?

    And the Linux project, in particular, is not in the business of trying to personally judge every entity behind the code contributions.

    Judging a technology is not the same as judging a person. There arent an unreasonable amount of different technologies that people complain about to not be able to judge each one

    Maintainers/reviewers don’t have to like LLMs, but it’s not really Linux’s job to judge who (or what) wrote the contribution

    People can feel alienated from contributing to a project if they consider it unethical

    And it’s also impractical. Contributors are going to use agents, so mind as well encourage them to attribute them rather than encouraging them to be unethical, and hiding it.

    Stealing is illegal, but people still do it. Its impractical to catch every person that has ever stolen something so why bother trying at all?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    There's also arguments to be made that there is nothing unethical about the tools in general, only with specific LLM models due to the practices of their maintainers, and the closed status of specific models.

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