Re: LLM based rewrites

[Dave Hansen]

On 3/7/26 12:49, Christian Brauner wrote:
> 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.

Let's say someone did this for the kernel and released it under a more
permissive license. Let's also ignore whether this is legally or morally
naughty or nice for the moment.

Any way you slice it, they'd start with a gigantic Linux-like code base
and effectively zero people to work on it. It would _effectively_ be a
big kernel fork. Maybe it would be different because it's got a more
permissive license. Linus would be proved wrong after all these years
and contributors would flock to the new codebase, throwing off the
chains of the evil GPLv2 that kept Linux from being successful.

Mainline has survived quite a few kernel forks. There would have to be
something pretty darn compelling about this new fork. Considering that
license taste is about as universal as vi/emacs taste, I doubt the
license itself would be compelling on its own. Maybe the new kernel
would be 100% rust? Maybe it would be more friendly to LLM maintenance?

Either way, Magic 8 Ball says: "Concentrate and ask again". So this does
sound like a great TAB topic! ;)