| I am somewhat sympathetic to the author's frustration, but GNU's stance on LLMs is still up in the air and given the controversy around generated code in general it shouldn't be surprising that GNU rejected this. That said, this post comes off sounding very arrogant, frankly. Especially when it comes to the legal arguments. Just to break down a few of the issues I had with this: > I don’t claim to known full context around the policy because - adding insult to the injury - this policy is discussed on the internal GNU lists. What I learned from past conversation around LLMs, however, is that the doubts about LLM contributions are around them being “open enough” and “legal to use”. I'm not sure what the insult is here. 5 minutes of research indicated that GNU has a working group for an LLM policy, and that the policy is not fully decided. And the current state of things seems to be logged here: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/working-group-ai-policy but there's at least a dozen other articles discussing this too. > When we’re talking about open-weight models, I find the argument about being open absurd. It means that Qwen 3.6 on my local setup is fine, but if I use it from OpenRouter - then it’s not. GLM 5.2 IS Open Weights model and if I had 256 GB of RAM (which I don’t) and 24GB of VRAM (which I have), I could run it on my local machine escaping the whole “SaaS is closed” argument. By the same measure, maybe Internet access should not be available during crafting of submissions? Internet is full of non-free content, and thus patch might have been tainted? Who knows, maybe the inspiration was taken from gasp non-free book or article. I'm going to ignore the first part of this, I don't think it's surprising that the GNU is prioritizing things which can be run without dependencies on external service providers. That is completely in keeping with the GNU's philosophy. As for the second part, I hate when people play this game. "Taking Inspiration" from something is not the same thing as having an LLM generate code. Copy-pasting from an online source would also taint the patch. This gets worse as we descend into the legal opinions. > Regarding legality argument - I think it’s hubris talking. > With all the sympathy I have for GNU organization, it neither is the biggest, smartest or the most legal-wise caring organization in the world. E.g. gaming companies are way more paranoid about IP and LLMs and yet usage there is visible as well; ChatGPT has a billion of active users; hundreds of thousands, if not millions of organizations - commercial and not, are using LLMs output every day. And for them the case is clear. GNU is pretty much ENTIRELY concerned with copyright and legal issues around it. We might recognize GNU for the code they maintain, but the various versions of the GPL are by far their most impactful project. It is the fullest expression of the vision for the open source world. I would argue that GNU is one of the most experienced organizations in the US when it comes to copyright law. Secondly, gaming companies, Microsoft, EA - all of them have billions of dollars to pay lawyers if there is a major copyright issue around LLM generated code. GNU does not have that luxury and if their code base were tainted with copyrighted code, the consequences would be huge. > And as far as my, IANAL, personality understands is: the problem is with putting a copyright stamp on it and not other way around. > Yet GNU believes that THEIR lawyers and THEIR opinion has the most weight. I won’t deprive them from the right of deciding for they own, but this lack of self-awareness is almost caricatural [sic]. Yes, that may indeed be how you understand it but I am going to defer to the team of copyright lawyers who have dedicated years to this stuff instead. I'm sorry OP, your IANAL opinion is not going to bear that same weight. I also want to dig into this in particular: > First of all, I could’ve hidden the fact of LLM usage, and yet decided to declare it explicitly. By being truthful I already lost my footing. This alone makes the policy stupid. If admittance is punished it’s better to push submissions without admitting. It punishes integrity, not usage per se. Because who will find out? I don’t trust LLMs at all thus I believe LLM-assisted work require actually MORE scrutiny and eyes - not less. Being able to lie about it doesn't really matter either way. Yes, you could have hidden the LLM usage. You can also lie about stealing code from your job and hiding in GNU submissions. Being able to lie about this doesn't mean anything, and I find it concerning that "I could have just lied" was a major part of this complaint. |