On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 09:31:10PM -0500, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> 1. **Legal Compatibility:** Contributors should ensure that the terms and
> conditions of the generative AI tool do not impose contractual
> restrictions that conflict with the distribution, modification, or use of
> the output in the context of Debian.
>
> 2. **Licensing and Attribution:** If any pre-existing copyrighted materials
> (including pre-existing code licensed as free software) authored or owned
> by third parties are included in the AI tool???s output, prior to
> contributing such output to the project, the contributor should verify
> that such materials are available under a compatible license.....
The problem with both of these is that it requires developers to be
lawyers. It's not entirely clear how much effort "ensures" mandates
in this draft GR proposal, and how much work the contributor is
supposed to do to verify whether an AI tool's output might include
copyrighted materials.
And just because something comes from a copyrighted material doesn't
mean that it is subject to copyright. For example, AT&T claimed that
this came from copyrighted source code:
#!/bin/sh
exit 0
But just because it came from a copyrighted source doesn't mean that
it is subject to copyright. That requires a deep legal analysis, and
having developers debate legal matters on mailing lists is probably
the best way to drive away contributors.
The only way to really avoid this is to explicitly state who is
empowered to make this determination. It could be the contributor, or
it could be the debian package maintainer. I would *NOT* recommend
that any appeal path includes the Debian TC. :-)
- Ted
