The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it’s properly disclosed and transparent.
The AI-assisted contributions policy outlined in this Fedora Council ticket is now approved for the Fedora project moving forward. AI-assisted code contributions can be used but the contributor must take responsibility for that contribution, it must be transparent in disclosing the use of AI such as with the “Assisted-by” tag, and that AI can help in assisting human reviewers/evaluation but must not be the sole or final arbiter. This AI policy also doesn’t cover large-scale initiatives which will need to be handled individually with the Fedora Council.
Much of distribution development is writing menial scripts and SPEC files. It’s tedious work with little creativity. The last SPEC file for an RPM package I wrote from scratch was years ago but it was so tedious work. The Arch maintainers even argue that their PKGBUILD files are so simple, they don’t pass the so-called threshold of originality and therefore are public domain anyway.
Much can be (and probably already is) automated. Compilation directives like CMake files already contain all the info needed to generate a workable if a bit bare bones SPEC file. I’d say an LLM might even be overkill for what a script could also achieve. The result is public domain anyway.