GlyphSigh. It's go time, folks: https://github.com/twisted/twisted/issues/12676
I've had a lot going on and have not wanted to have this difficult conversation with the community, but apparently we have reached the point where it absolutely needs to be laid out clearly. To be honest I am still kind of shocked that anyone would consider it acceptable to start putting LLM output into open source libraries at all, just purely based on IP concerns alone. The way that the vendors' IP indemnification works only makes sense for proprietary code.
Christine Lemmer-Webber@glyph It's nice to not feel so alone, seeing another FOSS project lead say "we don't want our project to become a legal experiment"
I feel like the fact that we haven't seen enough leadership in FOSS say "hey, we DON'T know the licensing implications of this stuff" is catapulting the greater FOSS ecosystem into one giant legal experiment that seems, frankly, very likely to be grim for us.
I might say more in a separate thread. This has been brewing on my mind quite a bit lately.
Thanks for saying what you did in choosing to make a policy!
Peter Cock@cwebber @glyph another example https://github.com/biopython/biopython/pull/5241 (not agreed yet), similar rationale. A little dated but I blogged on this last year https://blastedbio.blogspot.com/2025/11/thoughts-on-generative-ai-contributions.html
eclexicI honestly don't know why so many projects think the legal repercussions will be nonexistent?
Probably for the same reason proprietary code projects are pretending they will have any legal standing to protect leaked code written primarily by LLMs...
I think this will get kicked down the road for a while, but I don't want to be involved when someone decides to pick it up...
The one thing is though, I'm unsure if copyright survives this in its current form.
@theeclecticdyslexic @pjacock @cwebber so, I tend to agree the risk isn’t worth it, but I also understand why they think this. For one thing, the vendors have indemnification clauses (e.g.: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/protecting-customers-with-generative-ai-indemnification), so if you get sued for infringement you get some cover from your provider. They might think that this would apply if the project itself gets sued, although I am not so sure; in a proprietary case it gets more straightforward.
@theeclecticdyslexic @pjacock @cwebber There’s also a herd mentality which isn’t completely wrong, either. Open source license litigation is already extremely rare. The main people who *do* this litigation have openly advocated for accepting LLM contributions into your code. So who, exactly, is going to bring the lawsuit? https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html
@theeclecticdyslexic @pjacock @cwebber that question does have an answer; it would be a new group of people. But they would have to form, and organize, and find an interested lawyer, etc. so it’s a big lift.