alt Hacker News > Signed-Off ...
> The human submitter is responsible for:
> Reviewing all AI-generated code
> Ensuring compliance with licensing requirements
> Adding their own Signed-off-by tag to certify the DCO
> Taking full responsibility for the contribution
> Attribution: ... Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following format:
I am sure that this was reviewed by attorneys before being published as policy, because of the copyright implications.
Hopefully this will set the trend and provide definitive guidance for a number of Devs that were not only seeing the utility behind ai assistance but also the acrimony from some quarters, causing some fence-sitting.
Replies
Signed-off-by is already a custom/formality that is surely cargo-culted by many first-time/infrequent contributors. It has an air of "the plans were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'" There's no way to assert that every contributor has read a random document declaring what that line means in kernel parlance.
I recently made a kernel contribution. Another contributor took issue with my patch and used it as the impetus for a larger refactor. The refactor was primarily done by a third contributor, but the original objector was strangely insistent on getting the "author" credit. They added our names at the bottom in "Co-developed-by" and "Signed-off-by" tags. The final submission included bits I hadn't seen before. I would have polished it more if I had.
I'm not raising a stink about it because I want the feature to land - it's the whole reason I submitted the first patch. And since it's a refactor of a patch I initially submitted (and "Signed-off-by,") you can make the argument that I signed off on the parts of my code that were incorporated.
But so far as I can tell, there's nothing keeping you from adding "Co-developed-by" and "Signed-off-by Jim-Bob Someguy" to the bottom of your submission. Maybe a lawyer would eventually be mad at you if Jim-Bob said he didn't sign off.
There's no magic pixie dust that gives those incantations legal standing, and nothing that keeps LLMs from adding them unless the LLMs internalize the new AI guidance.
> Expected no less from Torvalds
This was written by Sasha Levin referencing a Linux maintainers’ discussion.