Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver

> 2. We will not accept changes (code or otherwise) created with the aid of "AI" tooling. "AI" models are trained at the expense of underpaid workers filtering inputs of abhorrent content, and does not respect the owners of input content. Ethically, it sucks.

Do you disagree with some part of the statement regarding "AI" in their CoC? Do you think there's a fault in their logic, or do you yourself personally just not care about the ethics at play here?

I find it refreshing personally to see a project taking a clear stance. Kudos to them.

Recently enjoyed reading the Dynamicland project's opinion on the subject very much too[0], which I think is quite a bit deeper of an argument than the one above.

Ethics seems to be, unfortunately, quite low down on the list of considerations of many developers, if it factors in at all to their decisions.

[0] https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relation...

> "AI" models are trained at the expense of underpaid workers filtering inputs of abhorrent content, and does not respect the owners of input content. Ethically, it sucks.

These ethics are definitely derived from a profit motive, however petty it may be.

I disagree with their CoC on AI. There are so many projects which are important and don’t let you contribute or make the barrier to entry so hard, and so you do best effort to raise a detailed bug description for it to sit there for 14 years or them to tell you to get fucked. So anyone who complains about AI isn’t worth the time and day and I support not getting paid as much if at all.

You're assuming "respect" means "payment" but it could be as simple as "recognition."

Conversely, if the only motivation is profit, that's no ethics at all.

(and of course without non-profit motivations, none of the open source ecosystem would exist!)

Setting aside the categories of art and literature, training LLMs on FOSS software seems aligned with the spirit, if not the letter, of the licenses.

It does nothing to fix the issues of unpaid FOSS labor, though, but that was a problem well before the recent rise of LLMs.

I'm not sure it's very well aligned with the spirit of copyleft licenses.

> FOSS software seems aligned with the spirit, if not the letter, of the licenses.

Yeah, only if you look at permissive licenses like MIT and Apache, it most certainly doesn't follow the spirit of other licenses.

Yeah that’s what I was getting at

The "spirit" of FOSS licences the various sorts of ideas that lead to the GNU project and the FSF in the 80s, and all that user-freedom-fighting heritage.

I think even critics of the GNU project and the FSF would have to admit that as historically accurate. I can only presume, then, that your comment is based on a lack of awareness of the history of FOSS licencing.

Perhaps a read of this would be a good start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License