Re: LLM based rewrites

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Sat, 2026-03-07 at 21:49 +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
[...
> Fwiw, I was made aware that there's a tangentially related discussion
> on the distribution mailing list at [3].

The lawyers on the European Legal Network are already debating this
point.  However, I really doubt that feeding the code base into a LLM
and saying rewrite it will pass muster at least under the US legal
tests for originality: it's the same reason why you can't give an
engineering team the code base and say rewrite it.  You have to apply
the clean room principles of one team reducing the code base to an API
reference and a separate team reimplementing it as a new code base to
get the required separation from being a derived work.

My point not being the legal one, but the technical one that the clean
room reduction to an API and back to code can be done by independent
LLMs, but likely not on the scale that something as big as the kernel
would require.  So it could work for small code bases but would be
prohibitively costly for huge ones.

Regards,

James