Due to security, ethical, technical and legal concerns, I’m going to spell out the AI policy for my OSS projects, which would cover everything under my username, my company (Osaka Red LLC) and the grig project. See my Codeberg.

In short, any use of LLM agentic coding is banned on all of my projects with a few exceptions, which will be listed at the end of this post. Of these no-AI projects, a couple have some LLM-generated code in them, but it is minimal and also listed at end of this post.

I don’t like genAI and I hate the tech industry’s cloud-based business models. My specific views aren’t necessarily the same as many of the anti-AI views found on the fedi but I won’t get into that here. On the other hand, I wanted to take advantage of what may be a very temporary situation where LLM agentic coding services are relatively affordable (pre-enshittification era) to boost OSS projects, particularly some that I have to get to a certain point soon.

I now think I was wrong to focus on the latter point and am now pulling back. The legal integrity of OSS is important so we need to be careful about this even if it could put us at a disadvantage for the time being (conversely, it may turn out to be an advantage). The issue is that the supreme court in the US (and courts all over the world!) haven’t settled the matter of how copyright applies to genAI output. It could be a disaster if OSS uses it extensively then any courts anywhere in the world find that this constitutes unauthorized relicensing.

So the basic AI policy on my projects are as follows:

Exceptions, projects that do allow the use of AI (I have backup plans if I have to start over and write it all by hand):

• Sabratha and Oea, parts of the Tripoli project.
• Gallae - this doesn’t do much yet…
• nchant - repo doesn’t exist yet, but newer version of my audio DSL (fka hxal) that will work with grig.audio. Will have more detailed per-project policy.

Projects that fall under the ban of AI but already have some LLM-generated code:

• grig.controller - was used to make some tests and dummy classes used by the tests
• lightly used in haxe-wordpress.

The rule I’ve always followed if I want to make my own software, I won’t even look at code that’s under a more restrictive license. There are many cases where it would have helped me to look at proprietary or copyleft code, but I refrained. Because whatever the law says, the intent of the original authors matter. When you release something copycenter, that’s an assurance to users of it that what they’re using or putting into their projects is safe to do so. If it’s even heavily inspired by anything not copycenter or public domain, then a fundamental contract with them is broken.

In some ways, the LLM is just a red herring with the whole chardet situation. If a long-term contributor to the GPLed project wrote something new by hand and contributed to the same repo, then it would be clear that they’re at least violating the spirit of the original project. Whether or not an agent is involved, it has to be a cleanroom reimplementation, which means someone else has to do it. There is a philosophical question of whether or not an LLM even can do cleanroom implementations and we’ll find out whether that’s possible from a legal perspective as soon as MIT-licensed clones of proprietary software lead to lawsuits.

But the open source community has never just been code. The persons behind the software matter. Pissing off copyleft people to appease corporate overlords and signalling that there are people in the OSS community who will stab you in the back will definitely harm the community and thereby the general public. In a time when tech companies are just getting more and more evil, OSS is more important and if unethical or antisocial behavior gets accepted, then everyone’s worse off.

I’ve always been more on the copycenter side of the divide, but the rule is we can’t be jerks to each other. That’s why I’ve always been careful about even the spirit of the copyleft licenses. Sometimes maintainers of copyleft projects will let you relicense part of it if you fucking ask. Being an asshole just encourages people to close ranks and see each other as the enemy. (Also think about how petty it is to attempt a relicense into copycenter when the original was already lGPL, admittedly kind of an odd license to choose for python, but probably compatible with non-copyleft projects).