On Wed, Jul 08, 2026 at 01:43:08AM +0200, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote: > On Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:42:48 +0200 > Ludovic Courtès <[email protected]> wrote: > > Examples of non-creative changes include > > mechanical conversions of package metadata from other repositories > > similar to those made by `guix import`, mechanical changes similar > > to those made by `guix refresh` or `guix style`, changes that > > merely follow suggestions made by `guix lint`, integration of > > upstream patches, changes of a package’s `#:configure-flags`, and > > similar package definition adjustments that are arguably below the > > [threshold of > > originality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality). > > > > WDYT? > > The examples above seems to make sense, but what's really the threshold? > Where to stop? > > The Wikipedia article doesn't talk about code and having to know the > exact threshold is a huge mess, and I don't think it's even possible. > > In most cases we didn't have to deal with that before. In Guix everyone > added their copyrights and it was up to courts to decide on the matter. > > And this didn't create any issue for the collective work as a whole > because there was also copyrightable code/data in there as well and > most[1] of it was legal anyway. > > And this whole mess is why I/we really need legal guidance here. > Personally I don't have the legal knowledge to tell that this is > original or not across a wide variety of jurisdictions.
I don't think I follow _how_ you think the situation will have changed Denis?
From what I can see:
- Before LLMs
- some code in the archive has copyright, some does not
- After LLMs
- some code in the archive has copyright, some does not
The situation has always been that the definition of what is 'trivial' is open
to interpretation. Often, as engineers, we assume there's a hard line in legal
matters and commonly there is not: which is why people land up in court.
I don't think there's any circumstance where we'd have to rip out LLM code from
the archive.
Even if we accepted LLM code the majority of our code would be
human generated for a long time to come, which would mean we'd still retain
copyright overall [0].
The reality is that even when the FSF eventually releases a policy, it will be
base on the USA jurisdiction, and it will just be an "opinion" by them. We won't
know if their opinion is right, or right in all circumstances for many years. It
will take many rulings in court around the world to figure out the the precise
details of copyright and automation (LLMs).
I'm not sure that copyright is a good pillar to lean on for the project being
pro/anti-LLM. We've elected to be open and low-friction in how we accept code
contributions. We don't have any DCO or contribution license, not do we assign
copyright to any entity. These are trade-offs that enhance community but reduce
defensibility.
Steve / Futurile
[0] further more some jurisdictions (EU) have collective work IP rules (e.g.
'database rights').
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