On 11/24/25 2:16 AM, Akseli Lahtinen wrote:
Contributor is always responsible for the code changes and creation,
regardless where the code came from, such as:
- Code was written completely by the contributor.
- Code was generated by an LLM/"AI" or any other tool.
- Code was given to contributor by someone else.
It needs to be supplemented with a license.
- Code was copy-pasted from the internet.
If the code has a license attached to it, sure. Otherwise, it seems like
a no-no thing. That being said, you can't also verify that that code
hasn't been copied from elsewhere, but I don't think that we should say
it's okay to do it. You can have a look at code and have your own take
on it.
Contributor must try their best to understand what their contribution
is changing and they must be able to justify the changes.
Using any tools to help understand and justify those changes does not
change or reduce the expectations.
The changes are attributed to the contributor, no matter whatever tools
they have used.
I am not a lawyer and I don't follow the legal stuff closely, but last
time I heard about the ownership attribution cases, it had still been a
muddy water thing. There are several schools of thought, each of which
has a leg to stand on: "it's a clever autocomplete machine, so you can't
claim ownership of a work, which is owned by somebody else" or "you
can't claim copyright just because you typed a query, you didn't put in
enough of creative effort to claim the ownership," or "the generated is
not strictly the same as the source data so it has been transformed," etc.
To be frank, I think the best course of action is to sit it out and see
where laws end up being.
