Re: [PATCH] docs/code-provenance: add an exception for non-creative AI changes

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2025 at 03:38:49PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> 
> I'm not enthusiastic. The current policy is essentially
> "the legal risks are unclear and the project isn't willing
> to accept them".

Broadly speaking the legal risks are unclear. The challenge from Paolo
though is there are some usage scenarios where the legal risks are
negligible, even in today's murky situation wrt training material
license laundering

>                 That's a straightforward rule to follow
> that doesn't require either the contributor or the reviewer
> or the project to make a possibly difficult judgement call on
> what counts as not in fact risky. As soon as we start adding
> exceptions then either we the project are making those
> judgement calls, or else we're pushing them on contributors
> or reviewers. I prefer the simple "'no' until the legal
> picture becomes less murky" rule we have currently.

The simplicity of the current rule is very appealing, but at the same time
I find it hard to justify why we should reject usage in some of these
scenarios.

So we have a choice of deciding we're going to accept the collatoral
damage of rejecting what are almost certainly low risk contributions,
or tolerate a little more complexity in our policy via exceptions.

I'm willing to entertain the idea of exceptions, as long as we don't
make it too onerous for our maintainers to evaluate patches with a
reasonable consistency across our different maintainers.

Something should be able to pass an obvious & simple "sniff test" to
be able to qualify under an exception. If we find ourselves having
to debate & ponder applicability, then the exception would be unworkable.

With regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|