Re: LLM based rewrites

On Sat,  7 Mar 2026 21:49:20 +0100
Christian Brauner <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hey,

Hi Christian,

> 
> I believe it is a rite of passage to at least once cause a shouting
> match with a non-technical topic.
> 
> It seems increasingly viable to rewrite an entire codebase using an LLM
> and it currently looks like there's at least some examples as in [1]
> where people try to use an LLM based rewrite as a clean-room
> implementation to relicense the project. I think the FOSDEM talk at [2]
> is related to this as well.
> 
> Maybe this is a "let's worry about it later" situation but I wonder
> whether this is something that the LF or TAB is actively following.
> 
> I'm not asking for a legal analysis. I'm mostly looking for reassurance
> that we as the kernel community and our representatives have an eye on
> this. I find this quite worrisome.
> 
> Fwiw, I was made aware that there's a tangentially related discussion on
> the distribution mailing list at [3].

Thanks for bringing this up. I'll bring this up as a topic for our next
meeting. Although it may not be much we can do about it except be aware of
what is happening.

-- Steve


> 
> Thanks!
> Christian
> 
> Link: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 [1]
> Link: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0 [1]
> Link: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick [2]
> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/[email protected] [3]