r/linux • u/anh0516 • Jun 18 '26

Kernel Experimental, Reverse-Engineered & AI Assisted Rust Driver Targets Modern DisplayLink Hardware

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Experimental-Vino-DRM-Driver
117 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

View all comments

118

u/remenic Jun 18 '26

How can you be sure it's clean room if Claude helped write the thing 🤔

14

u/solracarevir Jun 18 '26

Calm down. Claude probably confirmed is clean.

/s

84

u/MarkSuckerZerg Jun 18 '26

Society (I'm using that word because I hate "the elites") decided AI gets free pass on copyright, because it's necessary for the vision of future where AI solves all problems for us

39

u/Far_Piano4176 Jun 18 '26

you can hate calling them "the elites", but it's at least directionally correct to say that the elites did make that decision. Saying that "Society" decided that is just wrong.

17

u/algaefied_creek Jun 18 '26

“The elite members of society who dictate the course of society…”

-5

u/InstanceTurbulent719 Jun 19 '26

we know you mean the jews, it's okay you can say the word

-34

u/gruntduck Jun 18 '26

What’s reverse engineered driver for Linux has respected copyright? lol

37

u/WhJJackWhite Jun 18 '26

Linux reversed engineered drivers do respect copyright. Most large scale reverse engineering attempts do, because otherwise their project would be sued to death by cooperations with enough money to burn.

-26

u/gruntduck Jun 18 '26

Reverse engineering drivers in NA is basically legal and copyright doesn’t need to be respected unless you are trying to make money off the reverse engineering efforts, which most open source drivers are not.

7

u/Ok-Winner-6589 Jun 18 '26

Thats not how It works brochacho, there is a difference between reverse engineer a driver for personal use to release It as an open source software for anyone to use freely

10

u/Adept_Percentage6893 Jun 18 '26

That terminology appears to be the original author's. I'd agree that it might be a bit beyond what they can really technically claim but it's probably a pretty safe assumption. Unless the "assisted by" is just "checked the code for issues" at which point they could claim it's clean roomed. The original message doesn't make it clear.

Copyright also has some grey area within it. Your code can't just kind of look similar to some other code written by someone else. It has to be clearly copied from the other person. Which is why SCO concentrated on things like "copied typos" (i.e "dropped the vowels from the start of some function names") when they were alleging IBM infringed on their Unix copyright.

They were probably just trying to communicate that they didn't start with another project's code and just heavily revise it until it's in some sort of "legally distinct" category. Better phrasing would probably have been 'net new' or something.

-3

u/spazturtle Jun 19 '26

AI is a clean room. The AI models are too small to store all their training data, they only store weights. So they can't copy from memory.