This is false. I am a former Apple engineer. I did not conceal it (it's the top item of my resume and my LinkedIn and I made my PR from my public Github with my name attached, as opposed to a pseudonym which is expressly allowed by Asahi policy). I also had no exposure, at all, to any internal information or code about macOS, SPTM, or Apple Silicon during my time there.
I also don't have connections to people involved in Apple Silicon development (and I'd add that this does not mean someone cannot contribute, the question is were they exposed to tainted information, which is absolutely not true in my case). I have many friends who work for Apple (I'm a Stanford alum) but none in Apple Silicon directly.
I disagree with the phrasing of this entire thing, but this statement is demonstrably false.
On mobile I didn't see the full URL, and zoomed before I saw the calendar. My bad.
The author’s blogpost is sloppy and has some signs of being AI written. This kind of bleeds into the main point I’m going to make.
Asahi Linux folks are clearly more conservative and erring on the side of caution, so, this means that the glibness with which the author is treating any of this is probably sufficient cause to refuse his entries. It is unclear if LLMs should be considered a toxic waste dump in terms of trying to maintain a clean room. We have not established a standard. It is clear the author doesn’t think this is a big deal, so that’s one conflict. The other conflict is that it is not clear what their exact interactions with Apple Silicon folks is and their glibness of it doesn’t clarify anything.
If you take a group that is trying to be very careful about the potential legal landmines a still nascent technology has and you get someone that espouses a general glibness about those concerns wanting to merge code…why on earth would you expect that group to accept them as a contributor?
This is not to say this isn’t really cool and a neat use of LLMs, but it is totally understandable why Asahi Linux won’t accept the fruits of this kind of development. If it turns out that Apple can identify its non-OSS code in this, it’ll be a mess.
I mean they are working around and on hardware controlled by a nearly 5 trillion market cap behemoth who has resources on the level of some nation states.
I'd be erring on the side of caution as well if they could hire that many lawyers.
For the lazy.
And they say irony is dead.
I say this from an anonymous account but at least it isn't a throwaway. And at least I have the good taste to feel a little shame for my hypocrisy.
No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.
I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ??
edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.
It's safest to err on the side of plausible deniability, any proximity to OEM software increases liability if things go wrong.
For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Just call yourself "Idea Llmina" or whatever and let someone else commit it.
The only way to get flawless Linux support is to buy hardware from an OEM that supports Linux well.
I think at this point the hacking community needs to grow some balls.
The fact is, open source has much more liability than closed source software does. If copyrighted material ends up inside a private code base it'll be nearly impossible for the owner to discover that and sue.
Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?
I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.
LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?
The only real innovation for small planes is in the electric flight area - when you gotta do a full certification anyway as you're piloting an entirely new drivetrain, you can financially afford to be much more innovative on other parts of the design.
Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.
And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?
(I worked in a federal district court for a while.)
In a case where both parties have lawyers, having more and more expensive lawyers is not necessarily predictive of a case’s outcome. There are diminishing returns.
What having more resources tends to do is force the poorer party to settle quicker. But that’s not necessarily a loss. Judges still have to approve settlements in the interest of justice.
I hate the new system of no ownership and closed everything.
It won’t be clean room like the stuff Alyssa did.
Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.
Any other interpretation would mean trade secrets have essentially infinite protection/NDAs apply to all of humanity.
The NDA doesn't apply to people who haven't signed it, but copyright law does. If you know the material you're receiving is under copyright (eg proprietary source code), and you publish work based on that copyright material, the fact that it's now widely available is not an effective defense against claims of copyright violation.
Person B in this scenario hasn't violated the NDA, but they could be sued for copyright infringement.
Which I think you know, so I don't understand your argument.
You said in another comment "However, this specific thread is about the scenario where an employee has inside knowledge and is passing that knowledge on to the implementer."
It being proprietary and/or secret information doesn't affect the copyright of the clean-room output. If there's trade secret implications those are worth discussing, but as a separate issue.
That's what's referred to as a "clean room implementation" further up the thread.
However, this specific thread is about the scenario where an employee has inside knowledge and is passing that knowledge on to the implementer.
Legally speaking, a clean room implementation has much better defenses from claims of copyright violation.
This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].
[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...
Weird how justified reasonable policies get the "crazy" label.
Imagine what happen if OP submit patches upstream skipping Asahi and they gonna be accepted.
I have many frustrations with LLMs, mainly around the type of user whos brain shuts down, but Apple would be walking a very fine line if they offer a service that they also will sue you for using.
Perhaps they should have used the Foundation Models to build their code. Really put Apple in a difficult position.
Isn’t that just saying “he uses modern tools and has subject matter expertise”?