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PayPalAI generation, it's everywhere! And now it's going to be formally accepted into Fedora Linux, as per the latest approved change with a new policy.
The announcement came on the Fedora discussion board from Aoife Moloney that notes "the Fedora Council has approved the latest version of the AI-Assisted Contributions policy formally". The post links to what will be the final version of the policy and it seems at least reasonable, with whoever contributing the code being required to be fully transparent on what AI tool has been used for it.
Copied below is the approved policy wording:
Fedora AI-Assisted Contributions Policy
You MAY use AI assistance for contributing to Fedora, as long as you follow the principles described below.Accountability: You MUST take the responsibility for your contribution: Contributing to Fedora means vouching for the quality, license compliance, and utility of your submission. All contributions, whether from a human author or assisted by large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools, must meet the project’s standards for inclusion. The contributor is always the author and is fully accountable for the entirety of these contributions.
Transparency: You MUST disclose the use of AI tools when the significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without changes. You SHOULD disclose the other uses of AI tools, where it might be useful. Routine use of assistive tools for correcting grammar and spelling, or for clarifying language, does not require disclosure.
Information about the use of AI tools will help us evaluate their impact, build new best practices and adjust existing processes.
Disclosures are made where authorship is normally indicated. For contributions tracked in git, the recommended method is an Assisted-by: commit message trailer. For other contributions, disclosure may include document preambles, design file metadata, or translation notes.
Examples:
Assisted-by: generic LLM chatbot
Assisted-by: ChatGPTv5Contribution & Community Evaluation: AI tools may be used to assist human reviewers by providing analysis and suggestions. You MUST NOT use AI as the sole or final arbiter in making a substantive or subjective judgment on a contribution, nor may it be used to evaluate a person’s standing within the community (e.g., for funding, leadership roles, or Code of Conduct matters). This does not prohibit the use of automated tooling for objective technical validation, such as CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, or spam filtering. The final accountability for accepting a contribution, even if implemented by an automated system, always rests with the human contributor who authorizes the action.
Large scale initiatives: The policy doesn’t cover the large scale initiatives which may significantly change the ways the project operates or lead to exponential growth in contributions in some parts of the project. Such initiatives need to be discussed separately with the Fedora Council.
Concerns about possible policy violations should be reported via private tickets to Fedora Council.
This also follows a recent change to the Mesa graphics drivers contributor guidelines, with a note about AI as well. Discussions on whether Mesa will actually allow AI contributions seem to still be ongoing though.
What are your thoughts on this?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Good: Many people rudely throw AI generated text and expect others (that often have less time to waste) to figure out if the message even makes sense. There is a severe lack of ownership. This basically says that if you propose something bad that was AI generated we can shout at you regardless of if you understand it or not. Basically raise the cost of proposing AI slop as a discouragement.
Bad: The REAL bad thing in my opinion is how people's time is wasted by even having to go through this motions in the first place. It's stating that we're basically giving up in regards to using stolen work and fencing things.
No point in downright outlawing this slop; but at least, at very least, it can be made (more) transparent.
simplyseven 10 hours ago
I hate this timeline sometimes.
Kimyrielle 8 hours ago
What a disappointment...
I couldn't name you a single developer not using AI tools at least in some capacity these days. It's just them accepting reality of software development these days.
In much the same way that authors revile AI for only being possible by scraping pirated copies of their work.
Cloversheen 4 hours ago
I couldn't name you a single developer not using AI tools at least in some capacity these days. It's just them accepting reality of software development these days.
I can! Me.
My personal expectations? Bad contributors will show off how bad AI currently is without/minimal human touch, but both those who don't use AI and those who are using the AI as a proper tool will do just fine. In the way they are doing this, Fedora will have the receipts to throw at bad/lazy actors' faces when this is all said and done.
This policy is comparable to saying "You're allowed to copy-paste parts of proprietary codebases into Fedora contributions, as long as you leave a comment saying which proprietary product you are copying from" - which is clearly ridiculous. That's not to say the use of LLMs (and other generative AI technologies) is literally the same thing, necessarily, but it absolutely violates Free Software principles in a comparable way.
Amazingly, the policy even partially addresses this where it specifies that assistance such as grammar corrections do not need disclosure. This part feels reasonable, and somewhat comparable to say, allowing the use of proprietary IDEs to write the code that is being contributed to the project. Obviously some ground has to be ceded, and while some (myself included) might take issue even with this usage of LLMs, this nonetheless feels like where it is realistic to draw the line.
If this policy had ended things there, and simply stated "any contribution of LLM-generated code is prohibited, except for grammar corrections and similar clarifications", that would have been an unfortunate but understandable compromise for the project to make. Looking at the actual policy, though, it's legitimately hard for me to grasp how it was approached from a Free Software perspective.
Of course the Fedora Project is not, say, the FSF, and decisions have to be practical as well as ideological. To so openly invite technologies so hostile to fundamentals of Free Software, however - heck, going as far as specifically suggesting OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary product from an extremely user-hostile corporation, as an example in the policy - makes me think we likely haven't seen the last of conversations around this change.
Hopefully some degree of sanity will prevail.
Last edited by ivarhill on 23 Oct 2025 at 10:53 pm UTC
Cloversheen 9 minutes ago
This policy is comparable to saying "You're allowed to copy-paste parts of proprietary codebases into Fedora contributions, as long as you leave a comment saying which proprietary product you are copying from"It wasn't very evident from what I skimmed through yesterday, might have missed something, but yeah, that bit seems to not have gone past legal at all...
It just seems to invite an uncessary risk for fedora at this point. Humans breaking copyright is something that courts have dealt with and we have good idea for how that will work out, but AI? The wise and responsible thing to do is sit quietly in the boat until courts have decided how to classify AI generated content and who is legally responsible for the output.
Regardless if one agrees with the courts future decisions or not, or agrees or disagrees with copyright in general, it is the law of the land and one can still be held responsible for breaking a law they don't personally agree with.
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