Re: [MAINTAINERS / KERNEL SUMMIT] AI patch review tools

[Chris Mason <clm@meta.com>]

On 10/9/25 5:14 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

>> Indeed.  All the more reason to enforce it at the source.  It then becomes
>> a cost for the contributor instead of the upstream community, which is
>> going to scale better.
> 
> Forcing contributors to pay for access to proprietary tools is not
> acceptable. Forcing contributors to even run proprietary tools is not
> acceptable. If maintainers want contributions to go through any
> proprietary tooling before submission, then this has to run on the
> maintainer side (be it on a maintainer's machine, in some form of CI, or
> somewhere else).

I strongly agree with Laurent here.

> 
> You're right that cost would then be a problem. I can certainly imagine
> $popular_ai_company sponsoring this short term, until we're
> vendor-locked and they stop sponsorship. I don't think rushing in that
> direction is a good idea.
> 
I don't think vendor lock in is a problem though.  We're in a phase
where there is a great deal of competition and innovation in the space,
and the prompts themselves are just english text against a general
purpose AI.

-chris