On copyright/licensing:
I don't think parts of GHC potentially becoming public domain would be
an issue for the project itself.
As for copyright, what feels like a long time ago I listed it as one of
the reasons for declaring AI tooling use.
Even if in practice I don't see a realistic process to check if some AI
generated part violates copyright.
But our contribution guidelines already state:
> *Licensing*: make sure you are familiar with GHC's Licensing. Unless
you say otherwise, we will assume that if you submit a contribution to
GHC, then you intend to supply it to us under the same license as the
existing code. However, we do not ask for copyright attribution; you
retain copyright on any contributions you make, so feel free to add your
copyright to the top of any file in which you make non-trivial changes.
See also: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/licensing
This definitely doesn't protect the individual contributor, but it's
their choice to use such tools.
It's impossible to answer if this is enough to avoid maintainers being
held responsible for copyright violations others contributed to GHC,
but I would hope it would help.
From a maintainer perspective I think it's more likely that someone
carelessly commits license violation by copying code from another project
rather than through LLM generation. So while worth thinking about, I
think from a maintainer perspective we don't need special treatment on
this in the AI policy.
But given it's current length, perhaps adding one line that contributors
are responsible for generated code being compatible with GHCs license
would be sensible.
Andreas
On 16/07/2026 00:31, amindfv--- via ghc-devs wrote:
On 07/15/2026 6:20 PM CEST Julian Ospald via ghc-devs<[email protected]>
wrote:
[...]
All that matters is that I affirm: **I own the code, intellectually and
legally. [...]
As a side note, has the legal portion of this been thought through? At least
here in the US, it appears to be far from settled case law that you won't, for
example, be infringing copyright if an LLM generates code very similar to
existing code that's under a different license, even if the person using the
LLM has no knowledge of the similarity.
It also appears to be the case (at least in the US) that an author can't say "I own the code,
intellectually and legally" if they've generated code with an LLM and left it unmodified:
Thaler v. Perlmutter (a lower-court case) held that all copyrightable works must "be authored
by a human being." So, bits of GHC may now be public domain rather than under GHC's licence.
Tom
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