Maintaining our humanity and community

Nouveau first and foremost is a community of humans who love playing games and hacking on NVIDIA GPUs. We're not a business trying to sell GPUs. The humans involved, whether users or developers, are what drives and motivates the project and we care more about having a healthy community than we do getting about maximum FPS.

From a more technical perspective, Nouveau is a reverse-engineering project where most developers are working without proper documentation. Working on Nouveau isn't just about hacking up some code to get a test case to pass. The goal is to first understand the hardware behavior and then write the best drivers we can for that hardware. The knowledge we gain about the APIs we implement and about the hardware we're using is more important than the code we write. Using an LLM to generate random code until tests pass is antithetical to that goal. LLMs have no understanding and if a human is depending on one to fill in their own knowledge gaps, that means that they don't either.

As such, we ask that all our developers adhere to the following:

1. Any code submitted to the project needs to be your own work, not copied and pasted from the internet or generated by an LLM. The line between human and machine can be blurry and we obviously can't tell what you're doing on your own computer but we ask that the code you submit be the output of your own human brain, not a computer.

2. Any knowledge you've gained about the hardware needs to be, to the best of your knowledge and understanding, legitimate and above board. We're not lawyers and can't give legal advice but we don't want to do anything in the Nouveau project that would unnecessarily draw the ire of NVIDIA's legal team. In particular, disassembly of NVIDIA proprietary software or the use of LLM hacking tools which analyze those binaries is strictly forbidden, as is the use of any documentation obtained through illegitimate means.

3. Be kind to other developers and focus on learning and understanding. Developers and our community growing and learning is more important to us than getting the code written and merged fast. If you don't know something, ask a human. While an LLM may give you an answer fast, they often hallucinate and confidentially hand out misinformation. This applies doubly to nuanced technical topics and to things which aren't well documented online such as... well... NVIDIA GPUs. It's much better to ask the maintainers who have experience with the hardware and the APIs we implement to help you reason it out than to ask a machine to theorize. Regardless of what you do on your own computer, contradicting or responding to human code review or other feedback with LLM generated "explanations" will not be received well.

4. Racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and any other form of bigotry will not be tolerated in any part of our community. We want Nouveau to be a safe space for everyone where people can be free to be themselves and harassment will not be tolerated. For more details, see the Freedesktop.org Code of Conduct.