Re: [PATCH 0/3] treewide: migrate from legacy utime.h to utimensat

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 22, 2026, 17:59 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzeyeujde.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <aonIVn-ZQoMKWCAd@fruit.crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On 2026-08-21 at 14:23:20, Alexey Samsonov via GitGitGadget wrote:
>> This change is generated by Gemini Flash from Antigravity, but all the code
>> has been manually verified by me, and, where applicable, adjusted to match
>> the existing behavior as closely as possible.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't think that's allowed.  From SubmittingPatches[0]:
>
>     The Developer's Certificate of Origin requires contributors to certify
>     that they know the origin of their contributions to the project and
>     that they have the right to submit it under the project's license.
>     It's not yet clear that this can be legally satisfied when submitting
>     significant amount of content that has been generated by AI tools.
>
> I therefore haven't read this series to avoid being influenced by code
> we're not allowed to include.
>
> [0] https://git-scm.com/docs/SubmittingPatches#ai

Your stance, as I understand it, is that Alexey's DCO is not valid because, acting as a copy editor of Antigravity/Gemini's work, Alexey cannot possibly know where the code was copied from. And we cannot accept work that is not covered by a valid DCO.

I think that is a much more prudent attitude than being cavalier about legal issues. I used to think, "Hey, the person claims in the DCO that the code is appropriately licensed, so if it turns out to be a false claim later, that is his or her problem, not ours."

But that is not how things work.

If work submitted under a DCO later turns out to be based on something we cannot legally use, the submitter may of course be in trouble, but we would also need to bear the cost of ripping it out; the later we discover the problem, the more substantial the effort necessary to deal with the fallout will be.

Stepping back a bit, though, is the situation really all that different between a relatively new author who discloses their use of AI and another author similarly unknown to us who claims it is all their own work? Either way, if the code turns out to be unusable, we would still be on the hook for participating in the infringement and would bear the cost of ripping it out.

What worries me a bit is that there may not be much difference between "you said that you relayed AI output, so we won't talk to you" and "we do not know you well enough to trust you, so we won't talk to you".