New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD’s licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD.
Hell yeah! Get that shit… OUTTA HERE!!!
Ok but seriously, that is a very good reason to ban it. Who knows what would happen if the AI just fully ripped someone else’s code off that’s supposed to be like GPL licensed or something. If humans can plagiarize, than AIs can plagiarize.
But also, how are they still using CVS? CVS is so slow and so bad. Even Subversion would be an upgrade.
I get banning for quality, but for potential copyright is pretty stupid.
It’s not really stupid at all. See the matrix code example from this article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-code-generation-ownership
You can’t really know when the genAI is synthesizing from thousands of inputs or just outright reciting copyrighted code. Not kosher if it’s the latter.
I can understand why a project might want to do this until the law is fully implemented and testing in court, but I can tell most of the people in this thread haven’t actually figured out how to effectively use LLMs productively. They’re not about to replace software engineers, but as a software engineer, tools like GitHub copilot and ChatGPT are excellent at speeding up a workflow. ChatGPT for example is an excellent search engine that can give you a quick understanding of a topic. It’ll generate small amounts of code more quickly than I could write it by hand. Of course I’m still going to review that code to ensure it is to the same quality that hand written code would be, but overall this is still a much faster problem.
The luddites who hate on LLMs would have complained about the first compilers too, because they could write marginally faster assembly by hand.
We need to see more of this
I was hoping they ban it because it’s shit, but banning it for copyright reasons is fine too.
