Hi,

The discussion so far has landed on documenting which tools were used, the 
review practices applied, and human ownership of changes. That's all well and 
good, but it isn't what the ASF generative tooling guidance [1] actually 
requires. For a contribution that includes AI-generated content, the 
contributor needs to ensure that the tool's terms place no restrictions on the 
output inconsistent with the Open Source Definition, that at least one of the 
guidance's conditions on copyright and third-party material is met, and that 
there's reasonable certainty of this. From the tool itself providing 
information about output similar to its training data, or from code scanning. 
Peer review and adversarial LLM review are good engineering practices, but they 
address correctness and security, not the license compatibility of the 
generated output. They don't satisfy any of these conditions, and nothing said 
in the thread so far addresses them.

So, for the initial import: which tools were used, have their terms been 
checked against condition 1, and what code-scanning or tool-provided training 
data exists to support the remaining conditions? If the answer is "none yet", 
then that's what the committed provenance review needs to produce, and it needs 
to be done, with anything that can't be established removed or reimplemented, 
before the podling's first release.

My larger concern is simpler: who is making the commits? Were the bootstrap 
commits made by a person who reviewed each change before it went in, or by 
agents running under a person's identity? A commit rate of roughly 100 commits 
over three days by one developer makes genuine per-commit human review hard to 
credit, and the ICLA representations attach to the person named on the commit. 
Going forward, I'd want it stated plainly: commits are made by human committers 
who have reviewed the change and can stand behind it. Agents don't hold Apache 
accounts, and an LLM review is not a committer review.

None of this is an objection to AI-assisted development as such; it is simply 
that existing guidance needs to be followed. There's also a broader discussion 
to be had about what we expect of AI-native projects, and our existing guidance 
may need to be updated, especially as new AI laws come into effect.

Thanks,
Justin

[1] https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html

Reply via email to