Re: GCC LLM policy adopted

Simon Richter <[email protected]> Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:50:46 +0900
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi,

On 7/31/26 6:34 PM, Aigars Mahinovs wrote:

> You've missed significant exceptions that GCC policy grants - grant on 
> changes below "legally significant" limit (~15 lines of code)

That is the same limit they use to decide whether to accept a 
contribution without a contributor agreement, because it does not create 
enough of a copyright stake in the project for the contributor to be 
worth the effort.

For a human contributor, I would expect that limit to be cumulative. If 
I make 100 "minor" contributions, then it would be difficult to argue 
that because all of these were "minor", I am not a significant enough 
copyright holder.

I don't think this exemption has much practical relevance except if 
someone posts to a career forum that an interviewer talked positively 
about OSS contributions, then there might be a flurry of 
"Hacktoberfest"-style single-word spelling and grammar fixes again.

I can see at least some utility in accepting those, as the review work 
they generate can be done even by people not familiar with the codebase, 
and they are usually real improvements, and the people submitting them 
would not have become long-time contributors anyway, so not much is lost 
if they delegate their knowledge about the codebase to an external service.

    Simon