Linus Torvalds to critics of AI coding in Linux: "Fork it. Or just walk away."
2026-07-17 02:35 UTC
Replies (10)
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@hperrin@lemmy.ca 2026-07-17 03:02
Man, that’s so disappointing.
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@veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-07-17 03:03
Haiku it is, then? (Also, HURD can’t get here soon enough)
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@otterpop@lemmy.world 2026-07-17 03:37
Seems like this is in line with the Software Freedom Conservancy’s statement, then? It’s up to the individual. If you don’t like it, you can just not use it, and if you really don’t want others using it, you can just… fork it like he says?
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@aesthelete@lemmy.world 2026-07-17 03:57
Commenter is right. It remains to be seen whether or not it’s actually possible to license code generated this way as anything other than like MIT. A person didn’t really make it, and so a person doesn’t really own it.
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@BartyDeCanter@piefed.social 2026-07-17 03:48
That headline is a hell of a cherry pick of his full email, which itself is in a very specific context.
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@loppy@fedia.io 2026-07-17 06:35
Wow, they are at best cherry picking the article they cite on productivity with AI, if not outright trying to lie. They say Last year, an METR study found that open source coders using AI tools were 19 percent less productive than those who didn’t use them, even as those AI-using coders said they felt 20 percent more productive. But in a February update on a follow-up study, those same researchers said that “we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now—in early 2026—compared to our estimates from early 2025,” citing early raw results and conversations with study participants. But if you, y'know, actually read this February update, you would see that the researchers are lamenting the fact that they cannot draw conclusions effectively because of the proliferation of AI use. To wit, they say: Altogether, these issues make it challenging to interpret our central estimate, and we believe it is likely a bad proxy for the real productivity impact of AI tools on these developers. In fact here is the full passage Arstechnica cherry-picked from (emphasis mine): Based on conversations with study participants, we believe it is likely that developers are more sped up from AI tools now — in early 2026 — compared to our estimates from early 2025. However, because of the selection effects in our experiment, our data is only very weak evidence for the size of this increase. Based on conversations, which is to say, not on their data. This after the study a year prior which suggested developers are not reliable reporters of their own productivity.
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@MrSmith@lemmy.world 2026-07-18 07:15
Look, as long as the baby-shredder produces passable code, I’m all in.
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@rimu@piefed.social 2026-07-17 22:46
Anyone thinking about walking away might be interested in Haiku OS, which does not accept AI code https://www.haiku-os.org/community/organization/policies/
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@Zacryon@feddit.org 2026-07-18 12:07
In a nutshell he says that Linux is a technology project, where technology comes first. If LLMs help to improve the technology then it’s fair game. If not, then of course not. He also says something about Linux not being a place for ‘social warriors’, which is kind of ironic, given that Linux is basically a big ‘fuck you’ against corporations and closed source, i.e., a scoial statement. Given how much beef he famously had with Nvidia, this is somewhat unexpected. But I interpret it as coming from a place of seeing LLMs really just as a new tool and nothing more. In an interview a couple of years back, Linus also said pretty much that. He grew up with basic tools, had to create new software tools to make him more productive and improve the quality of his work. He saw LLMs just as another tool that can aid in development. I suppose this hasn’t changed. Given, that most people usually don’t program in assembler anymore, but use high level programming languages like C++, which simplifies the process of coding enormously, or even scripting languages like Python, which present another level of abstraction and simplification, LLMs do appear somewhat like a next step in this evolution. Issue is, you have deterministic and formal guarantees in programming languages, whereas LLMs do not. This is by far not the only issue of course, as others in this thread have also noted. I wonder whether he uses LLMs in his daily work. Might change his perspective a bit.
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@quick_snail@feddit.nl 2026-07-17 13:50
So Linux is no longer open source? Because we can’t fork something that’s not open source. And just 1 AI contribution means it’s a copyright violation, so its no longer copyleft.