LLM based rewrites

[Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>]

Hey,

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!
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/a3f792e918674e208492a077679ae6ffc88ce0c9.camel@gentoo.org [3]