[xlii]

> checking contribution policies "before the fact"

GNU has no such contribution policy. As I wrote it's currently a discussions behind the closed doors. Those who inform about usage of LLMs are notified that their contributions won't be accepted, and I think I'm second or third in the whole emacs-devel mailing list history.

Thread about LLM contributions sparked after my piece, not before it.

From my research, the only prior discussion was in March 2026 with conclusion that "lawyers are looking into it" and no followup whatsoever.

Though, if I made a mistake during my research don't hesitate to correct me, because it will prevent me from making similar mistake in future.

[vkazanov]

FSF is working on such a policy. Many other projects are announcing/discussing these.

Legal problems with LLM-written code are well-known. And copyright law is the cornerstone of open source as an idea in general.

Besides legal issues, major oss projects do not necessarily accept contributions to core subsystems by default. Maintainers can and often will decline patches.

I've lost count of my patches that were declined, or unreviewed, or unnoticed. And that's before the LLM explosion, when patches were small and expensive to write

Your frustration is understandable but could have been avoided.