This stance is CYA. There's no way to enforce it but by stating explicitly like this, they save themselves possible legal pain.

In the same way a lot of the other rules on that list are. How are they going to know you are familiar with the code you are committing? How are they going to know it is tested?

Sometimes rules are established to set up a common community base line. You are trusted to follow them in good faith. If over time, through code review, questioning or testing, it shows you aren't following the rules then you can't claim you didn't know it wasn't okay.

Seems impossible to me, although it seems more of some sort of protection in case of legal problems should someone add AI-generated code that turns out to contain copyrighted code by someone else. They must show they're doing something against that, even if that something turns out to be probably useless.

The headline of this HN post is misleading, it isn't really a "ban" as such and doesn't have to be "enforceable." These are guidelines whose target audience is good-faith developers who want to make positive contributions to NetBSD.

The comments saying "heh, those stoopid NetBSD maintainers would never know if I slipped a bit of AI into their codebase" are missing the point. The point of the guideline is to say that people who use Copilot/etc for NetBSD development are dumb assholes, so don't be a dumb asshole.

its not about enforceability its simply about covering their ass

[delayed]

yeah doesn't make any sense lol

if you remove comments and shift it to your own style then it's not going to be distinguishable except for sufficiently complex code where your own codebase's unique idioms may show through and the AI doesn't use them

Come now, you can have guidelines that aren't enforceable but which you expect people to adhere to. After all, you asked them to adhere to them, and they're (hopefully) not arseholes.

I doubt the people that think it’s fine to not respect NetBSD ethos are even capable of contributing anything to it so I’d say the project is fine.

Sufficiently complex code is the one most susceptible to coming from a proprietary solution

But are coding large language models in the wild trained on proprietary code bases?

If you don't know, it's a yes

I don’t believe in unicorns, but maybe they exist.

>But are coding large language models in the wild trained on proprietary code bases?

There are source availleble projects on GitHub but BSD license is not compatible with GPL and for sure there is ton of GPL code in the LLMs.

The only solution I can think of is too train LLMs on BSD compatible code to be used on BSD projects, GPL compatible code to be used on GPL projects etc.

See below link were copilot was caught stealing code and prove that it is memorizing and reproducing rather then learning concepts and then generating original code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287