On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 9:22 PM Ludovic Courtès <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Greg, > > Greg Hogan <[email protected]> skribis: > > > How is "legally significant" being used? > > The link to the GNU maintainers manual is meant to explain what is meant > by “legally-significant”. But you’re right that it is written with > copyright assignment in mind, which can be confusing. > > Perhaps we can drop the link? The “rule of thumb” that follows explains > what it’s about; we can still expound on it if something is missing. > WDYT?
But the rule of thumb is losing nuance when summarizing the linked document. Oracle and GNU have the same goal, to own the copyright in order to sue (for profit and to protect the GPL, respectively). And the documentation is clear that simple contributions which separately are non-copyrightable can as a compilation become copyrightable. But Guix does not aggregate copyright, instead simply requiring licensing of the derivative work under the GPLv3. Since "legally significant" cannot have the same meaning within the Guix project, how are we to understand the use of this term in GCD 008? The text says "to ensure the contributor has a valid copyright claim on the code" but the rule of thumb seems to attempt to list non-copyrightable contributions. > > The pledge commitments include the "will not use nor encourage use of > > genAI" but the policy lists exceptions. How to reconcile this? How are > > we defining "encourage use"? I would think that all acceptable > > contributions to the project could be discussed and encouraged. > > I see two possibilities. > > 1. Clarify “encouragement”: > > Examples of what would qualify as “encouraging the use of genAI” > includes: providing project members with a commercial LLM > subscription, communicating publicly on genAI-produced artifacts > related to Guix (e.g., in blog posts), suggesting in pull requests and > issues that people use genAI to solve their problem, and any similar > action. > > 2. Drop “nor encourage use”. I’m not a fan of this as it weakens the > rule, but maybe that’s okay in practice (hard for the project to > encourage without using). I would expect that references to non-free models would be disallowed, as with non-free software, but that generic discussion and help with permitted use would be allowed. As elsewhere, applying the existing consensus project rules and guidelines to this new technology rather than creating a new regulation. > > Regarding the policy on interaction, I think there is consensus on > > keeping the human "in the loop" but "copying text provided by genAI as > > answers or explanations in a discussion" is not "removing the human > > from the loop". And "direct interaction" precludes genAI actions > > requested by the user. I think the intent here is that we should not > > be pushing unsolicited requests from genAI to the user. > > Right, exactly. By “copying text” I meant pasting text: the human is in > the loop, but only to hit C-c and C-v (indistinguishable from an agent). > Would saying “pasting” instead of “copying” (I think that’s how Simon > phrased it) be clearer? > > What kind of “genAI actions” not covered by policy rule #3 do you have > in mind? Somewhat continuing from above, I expect the project would only run free models, and I can imagine a future where the user could request insight from that model on failed builds similar to guix-cuirass-bot. Or a QA-like system could evaluate logs for failed builds before retrying multiple times, conserving resources. The user would be taking action (such as following a link) to see the generative output. Copying vs pasting makes no difference to me, but I would prefer to have these examples and clarifications in the GCD text. Or the Originalists, Textualists, and Living Documentists must argue over the meaning. > > What is the purpose of the disclosure policy? Anyone wishing to avoid > > GenAI can tag and filter their contributions as "pure". Is the > > disclosure meant to be an "Assisted-by: harness (vendor/model)" > > trailer in the git commit? > > Disclosure is necessary to determine whether the criteria of item #2 > (“Contribution acceptance”) apply. > > André, Cayetano, and others suggested an ‘Assisted-by’ tag. However I > view it as promotion of the vendor without any technical usefulness, > since the code generation process is not reproducible. > > Instead I would prefer plain text disclosure, a checkbox in the pull > request template, or a tag like ‘LLM-Assistance: debugging’. > > WDYT? Is a checkbox or tag sufficient for that use?
