Comment by trollbridge
4 days ago
Likewise, it if claims something is “vibe coded” when it clearly is not (such as U-Boot).
Agentic AI has allowed 86Box to make massive strides forward. This includes a substantial contribution to emulate the Intel Inboard 386 that was created by someone who describes himself as a non-programmer. The community is now bigger and stronger, although we’ve had some aches and pains with slop AI generated PRs.
The same goes for Gravity Linux which is booting in my M4 Macs with working GPU and most other peripherals. What used to take years now takes weeks, so we can do much more thorough testing and ultimately have a better end product.
And what happens when the AI bubble pops and the various publishers and IP rights holders come around with their hands out claiming 86Box stole their code ala' SCO?
AI code is legally nebulous and relying on it for a serious project has major risks. Linux has already fended off SCO and has deep pockets to boot. Not all open source projects do.
More projects should be thinking less about the 'moral' issues (yes, they exist) and more about the nuts and bolts province and liability issues of using unverifiable code.
Yes, Linux uses it -because they're big and professional and have allies like IBM and Microsoft (ironies of ironies) on their side.
YOU do not.
> And what happens when [..] the various publishers and IP rights holders come around with their hands out claiming 86Box stole their code ala' SCO?
It won't, for a very simple reason. The same reason why the world isn't in the middle of a nuclear winter right now. Mutually assured destruction.
Every single proprietary software vendor right now is making heavy use of AI code generation, and we're already at a point of no return where pretty much every single commercially relevant codebase out there is contaminated. Do you really think companies will go on a suing spree where by doing so they will open up themselves to being sued for exactly the same reason?
>It won't, for a very simple reason. The same reason why the world isn't in the middle of a nuclear winter right now. Mutually assured destruction.
An interesting take, which I honestly hadn't considered.
The problem remains that it is still a cudgel which larger companies can still use it to shut down smaller companies/free alternatives. I'm thinking a similar situation to the abuse of the DMCA -but we'll find out.