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Comment by hackingonempty | Hacker News Reader

It might come to be that maintainers have to begin accepting llm-authored or llm-assisted contributions just to maintain control of the project. Otherwise users will gravitate towards forks that offer the functionality they want.

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They very specifically do not accept AI contributions because there is no way to tell if it's just regurgitating parts of the various Windows source code leaks from over the years ad-hoc, which would be a very costly mistake to make if Microsoft were feeling litigious.

On the other hand, it'd be absolutely fascinating to see how that'd play out. The ramifications could be huge.

More reason to ditch C, C++, and C#!

The language wine is written in is irrelevant, the source is still tainted.

For reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

Tech companies shouldn’t be able have it both ways and say that copyright doesn’t apply to LLM-generated code only when it benefits them.

And yet, they likely will be able to. The law doesn't have much hold on the rich.

They likely won't, once precedent setting judgements start coming out

That would be something Microsoft would have to prove in court and not that the AI came up with a similar approach on its own. ReactOS never got sued despite its similarity to Window's code.

Also not all Wine code is related to reverse engineering.

They might not have been sued, but ReactOS was certainly threatened. There was a large audit to ensure nothing was infringing. [0]

[0] https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit

The remedy for unintentional infringement is generally to remove the infringing code and cease distribution. That used to be a serious issue when rewriting the offending code might take years. But these days? Rewriting any offending code is a matter of specifying the interfaces and setting Claude / Codex to work. Risk of incorporating derived code might go up with accepting LLM submissions, but cost of recovering from them seems to have dropped accordingly, at least on the technical side.

Replace one set of LLM tainted code by a different bunch of LLM tainted code - perfect a and totally solid from any legal perspective!

(The paragraph above is a sarcasm.)

Is this concept of "LLM tainted" enumerated in a statute or potentially borne out of actual case law somewhere?

Perhaps you've never maintained any serious open source software. A line-by-line source code audit for license compliance including some ripping-out and re-writing of non-compliant code was the first thing I did when taking over maintainership of Repsnapper nearly 20 years ago. Was required to get it into Fedora. I don't see how the presence of LLM generated code changes that kind of work at all.

Or it might come to be that rejecting LLM-authored or LLM-assisted contributions becomes a badge of quality, and users gravitate to them to avoid buggy, inconsistent, or non-performant versions of the same software.

The allure of being just good enough where the bling and hype of features outshine hidden bugs may win out socially.

There's no need to guess, the reasoning is clearly laid out:

“Don't use an LLM tool to generate code. There's no guarantee that the training material of that LLM respects our Clean Room Guidelines, or that its output is compatible with the LGPL.”

--https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

Doesn't wine have various rules to remain a white-room implementation?

Not sure using LLMs which have possibly been trained on leaked Windows sources would be compatible with that. But that's just speculation, I wonder if LLMs possibly using leaked sources for training has been looked into. (probably legally difficult as the investigator would have to access the leaked sources too...)

Not sure if those fork would be maintainable long term if their authors need to lean so heavily on LLMs just to get their coding done. Would bet more on the original project that have demonstrated they know what they are doing & can do the work by themselves (if at more realistic pace).

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