I've come for my daily dose of corporate wolf in sheep's clothing marketing. Was not upset.
Linux
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
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Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
So this is a nazi-free non-slop option with an intelligent, inclusive, and compassionate community?
Because I’ve just learned to ask up front. I have more deal breakers than just those, but few occur with the same alarming frequency
Oh and tiling WMs are fantastic for a certain type of brain, but not for everyone. However I do believe there should be an option for everyone that isn’t some horrible ethical compromise, and unfortunately that’s just not the case.
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.
Cosmic tiling is a simple toggle in the top bar. It’s great. I just wish they had scrolling and a bit more stability on ARM
This might make me move from KDE after their shit stance on AI.
I just don't trust humans to prompt the gambling machines with any sort of integrity. People take shortcuts, AI now makes shortcuts super easy, addictive, and it massages your ego when you're right or wrong.
I really don't trust LLMs as they're made now. Natural language prompting is just gambling, think about it.
Hey Claude, please write "I have not used any LLM content in the creation of this patch" on all your commits.
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.
Studies have shown that professors can't tell apart AI from student submissions of writing. People like to believe they can recognise AI written or AI assisted code, but they are terrible at it.
For school writing, it's more difficult to know, because the subject matter is so well trodden and students writing stuff they didn't really want to write trying to "impress" a teacher with wordiness and crap has a lot of the same vibe of GenAI writing. It's mostly obvious when there is a stark style/knowledge inconsistency with your personal knowledge of the student. Personal knowledge of a student is non-existent in lecture hall sized freshman level courses.
For code, well, at least the most problematic submissions are pretty blatanty obvious. They are obviously the result of a person asking for something nonsensical and the GenAI outputs content as consistent as possible with the stupid request, and a stupid request manifests in a very glaring way.
Sometimes it isn't the initial submission, but the resulting dialog that betrays it. Someone submits a small patch that is... well... short and to the point but the change doesn't seem to match the reported scenario it tries to address. In pursuit of clarification it becomes pretty obvious that the problem lacked sufficient actionable info, but the GenAI operator pushed it to produce something and out came something with a rationalization that sounds plausible but isn't anything.
Also the write up, of issues and code contributions. Humans are inclined to just make things to the point. GenAI sloperators make dissertations out of stupid simple things, with all sorts of tedious styling and crap. Frustrating because somewhere in the mess is their point, but it's buried beyond recognition.
Sure, are a lot people who have no idea about programming and software development who will submit stuff, but the people who know what they are doing and using AI won't be easy to find. I say it will actually be impossible unless they openly say it or leave traces like AGENTS.MD or comments inserted by the AI.
Also, who actually knows he drive by contributor well? It's just the same as a lecture hall: unknowns.
Honestly, there are a few thoughts about this (and yes, some will be unpopular what I say).
- There is the ethics problem of how LLM is trained. It is a theft machine. Thats why companies love it, because they can steal work and profit
- However, people WRONGLY assume AI is exclusively for Vibe coding. When used by Senior/real developers, it is super useful for writing tests and code reviews. Some of the issues I've found in our old code from 10 years ago, were never reported (or, we had reports, but always assumed it was something else). There are tools for code review (and have been for a long time), but AI has stepped it up. In well designed / stricter languages, you can avoid a lot of errors that AI is good at detecting, but, it is still super valuable for this stuff.
- Also, good for security testing too.
- The biggest issue are untrained slop cryptobros, who throw money at it, and can't test (or understand) their code. Then it wastes other devs time reviewing it and identifying the 50 regressions it causes.
- We've had cases where I've had to argue with customers that Claude is telling them bullshit. From the support side, it has made things WORSE.
I'd argue it isn't actually a good thing necessarily to ban using it as a tool entirely from senior devs.
The biggest issue at the moment are arrogant junior cryptobros who are too lazy to learn to code, and just want to throw money at the issue. And that wastes everyone's time.
What we really need is a ethical AI model that only uses completely open code, pays people for their code (instead of just stealing it). and a way to ensure it is only used by developers who can use it properly. Ideally, only allow that code to be used for open source too
I actually wouldn't want to see Gnome/System76 completely ban it. What I would want to see is for it to be permitted for approved devs with VERY specific guidelines dictating how it can be used.
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.
The issue for now is LLM generation of code, not code auditing.
And no, I don't give a fuck whether some genius in theory could paint s new Mona Lisa with it. The issue us how it is used in practice, most of the time, today. At $WORK, I have a severely ai-pilled Senior Embedded Software Architect which hasnt managed in one and a half year to set up a working driver for a RS232-controlled stepper motor, from a port of previously working code. A thing that should take a week at most. I had to educate him that in C++ drivers, you need to use locks or mutexes to access variables that are concurrently changed and read from several threads. AI enables catastrophic levels of incompetence.
And FOSS projects need to protect themselves against that.
I've found 'senior' staff that became talking heads and stopped doing real work the bane of my existence in GenAI world. "I haven't coded in 20 years, but thanks to GenAI, I'm doing it again!" The reasons you stopped coding 20 years ago are plainly valid. Good for you, you got to transition to a grift based career where you say nothing but sound smart to the right people and get money, please don't return to coding because CodeGen is now 'cool'.
As a retired senior programmer, I would have loved to use LLMs in the past for very specific things. I wouldn't use it every day, but like every couple of months I had to do a massive refactor that took weeks to complete. I usually ended up writing codemod and just painfully changing tens of thousands of lines of code. Would be cool to just say "hey LLM, see how I did this one? Do the same thing everywhere else you find it. If you encounter anything that's too different from my template just leave it for me to review"
So I had a huge refactor and thought "Ok, this should be right up GenAI alley". And in fact took your very approach of giving an example for a few and said "go at it".
To my surprise, it actually did it pretty poorly, would not work, when it would have worked, dire performance implications. Failing to address things that technically would survive the rework functionally intact, but now a very bad way of doing things in new context. Problems exacerbated is that when I'm reviewing code, I tend to have a more optimistic assumption of the code than when I'm writing and second guessing myself. So it's all the more annoying to read code I didn't write screw up so much.
I will say it does a pretty good job of boilerplate heavy crap. If I'm going to want to make Go structs from JSON, I can just feed a sample and the very tedious work of making the sometimes maddening tedius Go structs gets chewed through pretty nicely.
Yeah I once tried to use it to write complex SQL and it just completely sucked at it. Like insanely inefficient queries that scan multiple tables multiple times instead of more efficient joins and other methods… Shame, I was hoping it would be good for refactoring at least if you gave it good examples
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).
Will projects that allow LLM contributions have to roll back years of progress when the other shoe finally drops? Seems like a huge risk, especially for FOSS and copyleft. I think disallowing LLM-written contributions until this is all sorted out in the courts is the pragmatic move from a legal perspective.
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).
The issue isn't necessarily that the work could be considered derivative, but rather that the notion of copyright exists only for work authored by a human. If it's not produced by a human, then the copyright belongs to no one, and no one can license it because no one owns it.
I gotta admit KDE’s stance on this frustrates me a lot.
On the flip side… I am also fully aware that policies of prohibition, in the broadest sense, tend to not be terribly successful, and I wouldn’t be shocked if some contributors simply excise the “co-authored by ” from the commit messages with a simple pre-push hook or something like that on projects that explicitly prohibit LLM/codegen usage.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Loving my move to Fedora Atomic Cosmic. Happy Silverblue user of long time, Cosmic just fits my personal zen better.
With their fast pace of fixes/new features, this AI stance is just the nice cherry on top.