First of all, I don’t take anonymous or pseudonymous contributions to any of my projects, so if you had made any contributions I would have your real-world identity. That should tell you right away that recourse is possible.

Then, if I learned or had reasonable suspicion that your real-world identity mapped to Hacker News user “orf,” I would instruct my attorney to send a formal contributor agreement to you to sign within a certain period of time that certifies that you are indeed the sole author of all of the content you submitted to the project, and that you did not copy it from another codebase without proper attribution or license, or use an LLM to write it.

If you refused to sign such an agreement, or signed it and were discovered to be lying, I would file a lawsuit for the cost of having having to remove your contributions for possible fraudulent misrepresentation of their origin, for the cost of having to hire one or more developers to recreate any any important downstream work that depended upon your contributions using clean-room techniques, and for punitive damages to ensure you were dissuaded from making fraudulent misrepresentations in the future.

That’s not LARPing, that’s what any business will do in the event of a possible breach of contract. Just because many open source projects don’t have someone like me involved with the financial resources to pursue such a suit as far as necessary doesn’t mean that none do.

A condition of making a contribution to one of my projects is that you haven’t used an LLM to create that contribution. By making a contribution, you are agreeing to this restriction, even without having any formal document signed.

If I then found out that you may have defrauded the project by lying about the origin of your contribution—say because you said openly and publicly “I would just lie about using an LLM”—then I would first give you a chance to declare that no, really, you didn’t commit fraud in these cases because even though you publicly said you would just lie, I’m betting that you wouldn’t lie in signing a multipage contract with specific penalties for breach.

If you wouldn’t sign that contract, then I would sue you to address the damage your fraud caused the project, which would include removing all of your contributions and anything depending upon them from not just the present codebase but the project history, as well as documenting and hiring someone from outside the project to clean-room recreate anything I deem important that did depend upon them.

These damages are not nebulous or ill-defined: Because of the untrustworthy provenance of your contributions, they *must* be removed, and they also taint anything dependent upon them.

In all of your replies on this topic you really sound like a teenager who hasn’t quite understood that your actions really can have consequences.

If you look into why it was historically very difficult to find GNU emacs code for older versions, it’s because of a situationexactly like this: Stallman just copied some code from Unipress (Gosling) emacs into GNU emacs, presumably thinking he could get away with the copyright violation. (He evidently hadn’t learned from getting smacked down for directly copying Symbolics code into the LMI codebase.) The end result is that FSF and mirrors had to stop distributing the versions of GNU emacs containing the Unipress-originated code.

This is not a LARP, this is stuff that actually happens in the software industry including in Open Source, and anyone involved in the industry needs to actually take it seriously because to do otherwise is to invite substantial liability.