Fedora Linux now permits AI assisted contributions (code, docs and more), provided there is proper disclosure and transparency
https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/542
Bad decision Fedora but it was expected when IBM/RedHat is basically fund it. Maybe that is what corporate client of RHEL/IBM wants. IDK. There are many other distros that bans AI/LLM but many contributions of Fedora ends up in upstream projects like Kernel or DEs.
Human code reviewers of Fedora project can only address questions of quality, fix security issues, or address missing functionality in AI code slop. It cannot answer questions about legality or licensing or even trace origin like:
> Where did that AI code come from?
> What licensing does AI created slop follows? Can you put it under GPL?
> So who actually wrote the code? Why person submitting putting their name on top of it?
The answer is: Nobody knows.
I am not a lawyer, so maybe they consulted IP lawyers or, worse, decided to just follow Microsoft's, Google's, OpenAI's, and others' idea of ignoring all copyright and ethical issues around it.
Interesting times are ahead and how the community will react it.
@nixCraft there is an even worse: perhaps they decided that if their ai boat is made to sink by the courts, they can use it to drag down the open source boat with it.
If they can couple the legality of ai to the legality of opensource, they can force the opensource community to side with them. And if they lose they may be well positioned to benefit from what the opensource world loses.
@nixCraft My guess is that they just realize the inevitability that a non-zero amount of developers have features like Copilot enabled.
Banning any code-assistance is naive. It's like banning autocorrect or spell-check on documentation, there's no way to know it's not happening at all, and realistically it definitely is to some extend.
Better than to have a policy, so we can at least regulate it. Unless they're starting to allow literal bots to do MR's and be responsible, I'm not too worried.
I think these are pretty wild guesses. AI can help people understand syntax errors, unknown codebases etc.
Fedora is a very complex project that will always need many developers. Note that most Fedora devs already do that in their free time, even though they might work their daytime job at Redhat.
The issues of licensing, stealing code and heating up the climate are severe and should be solved.
@StarkRG @catsalad @nixCraft Ignoring all the ethical issues of AI generated anything (and we really really really shouldn't ignore those), my experience with AI is that it's like having to review code written by a junior that is incapable of learning.
Because that is my favourite part of coding... sure...
@ainmosni @StarkRG @desantis @catsalad @nixCraft One of the many things I hate about LLMs is that this is essentially the opposite of software engineering, and yet so many software engineers seem to go along with it.
I'd hope that if more people knew the basics of coding, they'd recognize the problem. But that fact suggests otherwise.
It's as if medical schools were going all in on faith healing.
@StarkRG @catsalad @nixCraft Oh, there's promise, but as many of the AI researchers I've met have decried, LLMs have taken the wind out of the sails of the actual useful stuff.
I would have loved to see what would have happened if we weren't living under capitalism, somehow I think we'd have a lot less of this "can do the work of a human, if you drink 2 full litres of grain spirit before inspecting the work" nonsense.
@nixCraft Time to watch where this contagion winds up.
Sometimes, the only way to deal with a pernicious disease is to amputate!
@nixCraft It's really gross that they would decide to allow it, but I think they're putting the best possible restrictions on it by requiring the submitter to understand the generated code, but at that point why allow it? Why not just write good code yourself instead of rolling dice for it?
If this ends up causing problems (it will), does anyone have suggestions for what distro I should migrate my server to? Not Ubuntu or Arch, systemd preferred. I know Debian is good, but I don't like the release cycle; it's still my first choice despite that.
@jackemled @nixCraft im more worried about the ethical implications of allowing genAI explicitly, thus of genAI (ecological worries, digital labour, legal risks etc), i would think they *probably* have good quality assurance. but as you say, why bother then as most genAI contributions are of poor quality
if youre looking for alternatives to Fedora, and assuming you would prefer Fedora over other options due to, for example, quality and release cadence... then i would think of FreeBSD and Gentoo (even if im aware of the onboarding of the latter, it seems to be very good in regards to the control you have). i imagine declarative options like NixOS and Guix SD can also be considered, but Guix seemingly has quite old packages. personally im on Debian for most systems and likely going full Debian to replace Fedora, but you surely know enough to have gauged why it wasnt good for you
openSUSE could also be an option but i very much doubt it being a good alternative for our concerns, since you go from one distro whose corporate influence likely played in AI adoption towards another distro where... the corporate influence could lead into AI adoption just as easily
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