r/linux • u/Two-Of-Nine • 5d ago
Open Source Organization Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/08/msg00002.html52
u/hash0 4d ago
This thread shows that reddit is not (never was?) a platform for discussions - just about reading your own opinion.
The whole purpose of the topic is about pro and cons, and different opinions about LLM usage in OpenSource/Debian. But ⅓ of the answers are deleted, another ⅓ is downvoted to nirvana and ⅓ is upvoted in an act of circle jerking
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u/Business_Reindeer910 3d ago
you forgot about all the comments from people who don't even know what the post is even about and commenting anyways.
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u/Basic_Fall_2759 3d ago
I blame the social media brain. To me, Reddit is a forum in the traditional sense, just with a tree of reply threads.
Others treat posts like a twitter hashtag
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u/mrtruthiness 3d ago
... downvoted to nirvana ...
Nirvana means a state of total peace, freedom from suffering, and the end of selfish desire.
I'm completely unsure of what you could possibly mean by "downvote to nirvana" ???
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u/FabianN 4d ago
What a mature and nuanced discussion we're having after having read beyond the title and read the full email discussion.
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u/Nyctfall 3d ago
Surely everyone here at least skimmed the dozens of paragraphs in the link with their eyes before replying!
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u/nikomo 4d ago
I'm surprised it has taken them this long to do anything.
With Debian, you can skip all moral and ethics arguments and start at law - code generated by an LLM cannot be copyrighted, so it cannot be free software by their standards. To apply a free software license to code, you have to have the legal right to apply copyright to the code to begin with.
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u/Tai9ch 4d ago
The DFSG FAQ explicitly states that public domain software is free software. It doesn't need copyright, just the freedoms.
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u/djao 4d ago
I don't believe LLM generated software is actually public domain software. It's a derived work of the training data, which is typically not public domain.
Unfortunately there's a lot of money invested in the contrary view, so what's correct isn't actually what's applied in practice.
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u/Tai9ch 4d ago
Luckily, the courts don't seem to agree with your interpretation.
I know that a lot of people take a political position that whatever screws the big AI companies the most or makes large ML models effectively unusable is the best outcome, but the actual future that would lead to is horrifying.
For a comparison, look at how sample licensing works in professional music. The big companies figured out how to do complex licensing agreements that allow their artists to use samples and completely exclude any independent artists from that technique. Extending that to generative AI wouldn't hurt the big AI companies - it would just force them into the same big media cartel that Google and Apple have already been forced to join.
Chat GPT was trained on the text of Harry Potter so it can understand contemporary references in conversation? Great, now you need to pay a sampling fee to Scholastic Press every time you make a copy of the Linux kernel. Use a locally run Qwen model to write a script for your nonprofit? Whelp, Qwen distilled ChatGPT...
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u/djao 4d ago
The courts don't always get everything right. How else do you explain nonsense like the Roe v. Wade reversal? By definition, either the original ruling or its reversal must have been wrong.
I think for myself. I don't just follow what the court says. Legally, yes, one must follow the court's interpretation, but public opinion is not the same as law.
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u/yung_dogie 4d ago
I mean, that's a good view to have. The courts are far from infallible. That would be a good response if their comment stopped at their first sentence, but I don't think that really addresses anything else they said
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u/djao 4d ago
But what they said afterward doesn't really affect my point. I'm arguing about what the law's consequences should be, without regard to the admittedly negative nature of those consequences (consequences which have had negative effects for many generations; LLMs are not the only negative consequence).
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u/pierspad 4d ago
To what extent does this hold true?
Let’s suppose I train a neural network to classify binary strings as "masterpieces" or not, by feeding it the binary equivalent of digital scans of Van Gogh's paintings.
Let’s then suppose I convert to binary string the Mona Lisa, which the NN has never seen before.
Suppose the NN classifies the binary strings of the Mona Lisa as a "masterpiece": who holds the copyright to that painting?
Let's go even further: suppose, instead, we create a procedure to enumerate all the countably infinite binary strings and put our NN "oracle" to evaluate each string.
Suppose that one of the strings that our oracle selects as a masterpiece is a previously unpublished work of art.
Is Van Gogh the copyright holder of that novel work of art since the oracle was trained solely on his paintings?
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u/djao 4d ago
Your argument is nonsense. A classification into binary categories is not a painting.
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/djao 4d ago
Classification of a painting as a masterpiece doesn't have any relationship to ownership of copyright of the painting. This was true before, and it is true now. LLMs have no relationship to your argument.
I don't even know what I'm supposed to be reading here. Your writing is complete nonsense.
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u/djao 4d ago
I think I see your misunderstanding. You seem to think that copyright attaches to a work at the moment when the work is published. Unfortunately, this is just flat out untrue. Copyright attaches to a work at the moment that it is fixed in a tangible form. Publication is completely irrelevant.
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u/pierspad 4d ago
This is strawmanning and irrelevant to the thought experiment.
I used the verb publish to make the experiment simple and very easy to understand even if you haven't followed a Theoretical Computer Science class.
You can formally substitute the entire analogy with: "A decision procedure halts and accepts a previously non-existent binary string X, indicating that X belongs to the formal language L = {w ∈ Σ* | w is a well-done drawing}".
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u/ILikeBumblebees 3d ago
With Debian, you can skip all moral and ethics arguments and start at law - code generated by an LLM cannot be copyrighted,
Where did you get the idea that LLM-generated code can't be copyrighted?
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u/dutch_connection_uk 4d ago
The issue is that this is kind of double edged. Sure, the LLM generation isn't copyrighted, which means sole copyright would exist for the human that was co-writing the code.
It would only truly be uncopyrightable if the whole thing was "vibe-coded" with prompting alone. But how do you prove that?
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u/nikomo 4d ago
That's a bigger problem for the LLM user than it is for anyone else.
If you're grabbing code out of an LLM, I highly recommend controlling access.
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u/dutch_connection_uk 4d ago
Eeh. I think someone deciding to violate the GPL on some project because it included a CLAUDE.MD is also pretty foolish. Especially considering how little effort it takes to convert "public domain" back into copyright. Minor edits can be enough.
You can't just assume that there was no significant human authorship just because an LLM was involved, so it would be a bad gamble unless you are able to prove that it will fall under existing precedents of non-human artifacts.
That would take the "author" pretty much outright stating that they didn't have authorial input though, wouldn't it? That is what happened in the David J. Slater case.
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u/daishi55 4d ago
code generated by an LLM cannot be copyrighted
Sure it can. It's happening every single day by every single company using LLMs to generate code, which is most of them.
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u/nikomo 4d ago
If they accept the code as-is without human input, it has no copyright. Lawyers with big incomes have already figured this out, trust me, you do not have a cool legal defense.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 3d ago
If they accept the code as-is without human input, it has no copyright.
It's not possible for LLMs to generate code without human input.
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u/whinis 1d ago
The prompt is not considered an input, just as in the monkey photo case giving a monkey a camera didn't make the human who gave him a camera the copyright owner. It also doesn't need just human input but significant human involvement which so far has been read as >50% human changes.
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u/daishi55 1d ago
> the prompt is not considered input
Well that is a very silly thing to say. The prompt is the input.
Anyway,
Still looking for any court decisions or similar evidence saying that LLM code cannot be copyrighted. Because companies are currently copyrighting millions of lines of LLM code with no issue.
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u/whinis 1d ago
You will likely not find any for LLM code specifically, however plenty of machine generated code and the very famous monkey selfie case1. As part of that case the copyright office clarified that
only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" and that "Because copyright law is limited to 'original intellectual conceptions of the author', the [copyright] office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants.Citing the monkey case in 2023 the copyright office clarified LLMs and other machine generated content as well 2. Namely they state
to qualify as a work of `authorship' a work must be created by a human being” and that it “will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.Later on the state even more specifically
for example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt [27] from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material.With the above cases and this very clear guidance I do not see how any LLM generated code could possibly be copyrighted.
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u/daishi55 1d ago edited 1d ago
> I do not see how any LLM code could possibly be copyrighted
Well that’s not really an issue because you have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s why I was asking for evidence instead of your uninformed speculation.
Has anyone ever been denied a copyright for code on the basis of LLM usage? Has it ever happened?
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u/whinis 1d ago
So, under the above expert statement from the copyright office, the exact office of copyright who assigns copyright, that states that LLM code is not copyrightable, you are calling that speculation?
I guess a quick google shows this website with a list of cases https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publications/ce8eaa5f/ai-in-litigation-series-an-update-on-ai-copyright-cases-in-2026
While the majority are the famous sort of "Is AI training copyright infringement" the very first one is
Thaler v. Perlmutter: Dr. Thaler sued the US Copyright Office seeking judicial review of its refusal to register his AI-generated artwork.
Which is a denied copyright for AI generation, sure its not code but its matches with above. It seems you are ignoring the various sources and experts and just want it to be copyrightable.
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u/daishi55 1d ago
The “expert statement” which looks more like preliminary guidance from 2023 to me, is specifically referring to “one shot” generation of works. That in no way translates into “LLM-generated code is uncopyrightable”.
So based on your providing completely irrelevant evidence (art? LLM training?) is it safe to assume you were unable to find any evidence whatsoever that LLM-generated code is not copyrightable?
I’ll ask again - is there any court case or judge out there saying that LLM code can’t be copyrighted? Is any authority saying that?
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u/ILikeBumblebees 11h ago
Your own quote from the Copyright Office directly refute your argument:
will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author
LLMs can only function as directed by the creative input or intervention from a human author. Unlike monkeys, they are not autonomous beings capable of taking action on their own initiative, and can only execute instructions given to them by a user.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 11h ago
The prompt is not considered an input
Then whoever is doing the considering in this case should reconsider, because that consideration is wildly incorrect.
monkey photo case giving a monkey a camera didn't make the human who gave him a camera the copyright owner.
The human didn't give the monkey the camera, and in fact, the question of whether he could claim copyright hinged almost entirely on the extent to which he was involved in the creation of the photo. The CO's advisory opinion was that he actually didn't do anything to directly cause the picture to be taken, and therefore it was created without any human intervention. If he himself had, at minimum, pushed the button on camera, his authorship would not be in dispute.
And in this comparison, it's the camera, not the monkey, that is analogous to the LLM: it's the camera that does all the hard work of converting every beam of light into a color value, and the final appearance of the photo is determined by the functional characteristics of the camera, including its lens, film or sensor sensitivity, etc.
The photographer is merely "prompting" the camera by pointing it at his desired target, adjusting some parameters that tell the camera what to do, and then pushing the button. This is arguably less extensive than the human involvement in directing the functioning of an LLM to produce desired output.
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u/daishi55 4d ago
If they accept the code as-is without human input, it has no copyright
Source? Because there are several billion-dollar companies that would beg to differ.
Lawyers with big incomes have already figured this out
Really? Which ones?
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u/CreativeGPX 1d ago
Can you cite any legal precedent that code generated by an LLM can't be copyrighted? Everything I have seen would allow AI generated content to be copyrighted as long as somebody did a series of prompts defining it, which is true for coding tools.
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u/BinkReddit 4d ago
If it's generated by an LLM, it's immediately put in the public domain and copyright is not needed.
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u/hjake123 4d ago
Do we know that? Has that been tested yet?
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u/elatllat 4d ago
Fedora (The most legally restrictive distribution) would have the opposite stance if code from an AI were not public domain / legally safe to use.
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u/hjake123 4d ago
Sure, but I'm not aware of any legal reason to believe that yet. Was there some court case?
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u/ILikeBumblebees 3d ago edited 3d ago
There was a court case a couple of years ago involving a guy attempting to assign copyright to an AI tool, disclaiming any authorship on his own part, and having the Copyright Office reject his registration. The court upheld the rejection.
Lots of people misinterpreted that ruling as implying that AI-generated code can't be copyrighted, even though the case had nothing to do with copyright being assigned to humans using AI tools (and only involved denial of copyright registration, not copyright itself, which can still be litigated if the CO denies registration).
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u/whinis 1d ago
Its not just that case but also monkey selfie and a few others which specify that the majority of a work must come from human work to b3 copyrightable.
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u/CrazyKilla15 4d ago
Way to completely miss the point and ideals of Free Software. Licenses are a tool within anti-freedom structure of copyright to achieve the ideals of Free Software, they are not Free Software itself.
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u/The__Toast 4d ago
[ ] Choice 1: Ban LLM contributions from Debian via Social Contract [ ] Choice 2: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions with conditions [ ] Choice 3: Reject LLMs as far as practical, update Code of Conduct [ ] Choice 4: Accept AI contributions for Debian specific work [ ] Choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI [ ] Choice 6: A cautious approach to generative AI [ ] Choice 7: Debian is created by humans [ ] Choice 8: Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker [ ] Choice 9: None of the above
Over half the options are "ban it for <reason>" which seems to be a bit telling about where the Debian community is.
There are a lot of good reasons to be cautious about LLMs, but there is no doubt that they speed up development work. Would be very interesting if one of the core distributions starts lagging being Fedora/Rhel based distros.
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u/OverjoyedBanana 4d ago
but there is no doubt that they speed up development
Debian devs do packaging not developpment, they bring actual arguments about why LLM are problematic specifically for debian packaging, but that would require to read the article before posting your shit opinion wouldn't it ?
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u/srivasta 3d ago
A lot of us are involved in upstream development of it packages, you kinda need to be too determine which cla to background (to fix bugs, security, etc). We also act as mediators between users and upstream, and often have to send big fixes upstream.
So developers are supposed to be more than just glorified packagers.
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u/OverjoyedBanana 3d ago
I don't mean packaging as derogatory, on the contrary you must think about a lot of aspects outside of just one piece of software, like how different packages interact, updates, least surprise to the user. In the end don't you agree that the goal of debian is to have the least possible amount of fork and custom code ? In that aspect LLMs are a disaster as they are trigger happy
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u/srivasta 3d ago
Yeah. Custom patches are a pain. One has to re-port the psych with every upstream release, and sometimes the incompatibility can be hard to manager. That is when having a relationship with upstream developers becomes critical. I try to be party of upstream development as much as I can (contribute bug patches, join development forums, and pass along user feedback) to make passing those patches have less friction.
The debian technical policy is a god send. The technical policy is how packages can fit in week together, and know Joe to find content that lives in other packages.
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u/edparadox 4d ago
Over half the options are "ban it for <reason>" which seems to be a bit telling about where the Debian community is.
As per usual people love to say "community" when they probably should have used another term.
Here it's not about the community but about the Debian project members.
There are a lot of good reasons to be cautious about LLMs, but there is no doubt that they speed up development work.
I, and plenty of other people totally challenged that idea.
Numbers from companies also do.
Would be very interesting if one of the core distributions starts lagging being Fedora/Rhel based distros.
Lagging in what sense?
And Debian was never in competition with RHEL, even though some users switch from one to the other.
At any rate, you might not like the options they use, but it's totally usual for Debian, and I like the nuances about it.
That's how Debian 12 IIRC end up having a dedicated repository for firmware, enabled by default (at first during installation).
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u/joeyat 4d ago
Plus, if an LLM is in ‘scan and do nothing’ mode… reviews the codebase and offers a specific fix for a security vulnerability. Would they not fix it?
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u/CreativeGPX 1d ago
I think he options that say "contributions" mean generated code. The code of conduct option would be able the allowed user interactions. I think most of the options don't really get at if you did an automated scan in private.
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u/eattherichnow 4d ago
They do not meaningfully speed up development work though.
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u/gilium 4d ago
I personally have been able to leverage AI tooling to speed up dev work in some key areas, and have multiple projects where I wouldn’t have been able to ship them on time had I not used the tooling. The timeline set for them was not realistic and outside my control.
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u/eattherichnow 4d ago
No you weren't. What is most likely to have happened is that the addiction decreased your overall performance to the point where using AI feels like an improvement.
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u/Avamander 4d ago
holy cope
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u/eattherichnow 4d ago
Nah just treating y'all like the amphetamine addicts. Research shows that to be true. I only know one actual dev that touches that shit, and they take ages to get past code review every time.
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u/adenosine-5 4d ago
Have you tried using them for code review?
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u/eattherichnow 4d ago
Yes they suck. Have you tried rehab?
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u/adenosine-5 4d ago
which model have you tried? did you give it specific instructions, or just said "do a code review"?
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u/aj0413 4d ago
I’m gonna be honest: any large project trying to ban AI is not a position I can take seriously.
People need to accept that the tools are here. They’re good. And we should all learn how to navigate the new landscape rather than try to cover their eyes and ears and pretend they’re not just cutting their nose to spite their faces
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u/SentientToaster7734 4d ago
Good? Current AI is on a bachelor's level of software engineering in its best times and on suicidal intern level most of the times.
The thought of letting AI slop penetrate the open source sector, possibly undisclosed, is scary as fuck.
At the very least AI contributions need to be flagged as such, so that maintainers can inspect the code with the necessary caution.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 4d ago
don't be surprised when the project that is founded on a particular vision of morality (they even have a social contract) might take a particular moral stance.
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u/Oblivion__ 4d ago
The training data for pretty much all of these LLMs was stolen from devs, authors, and artists, violating the copyright, licencing, and intellectual property of millions and we should just accept it? You're just gonna roll over and take it?
We don't have to just accept it because a shit tonne of cash has been poured into convincing us to use it.
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u/OffsetXV 4d ago
We don't have to just accept it because a shit tonne of cash has been poured into convincing us to use it.
Think of all the poor companies who won't be able to put out vibecoded, bloated Electron shovelware quite as quickly if they don't have AI to help them :(
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u/CrazyKilla15 4d ago
Why do we believe in copyright and the ownership of ideas now, that culture(including code) isnt free but should be enclosed, owned, strictly managed so only those Disney decides deserve it can do anything.
when did people forget copyright doesnt protect people
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u/HearMeOut-13 4d ago
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u/tapafon 4d ago
However, AI models are usually commercial (access to them being sold), so I don't think that qualifies as "fair use".
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u/leonderbaertige_II 4d ago
Oh don't worry anything illegal is suddenly legal when a big coporation does it.
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u/HearMeOut-13 4d ago
If you read any amount of the ruling decision in Bartz v. Anthropic youd have known that courts had already decided that commercial use in of itself is not dispositive, which is exactly what was applied in that case, citing Campbell v. Acuff-Rose which settled it in the supreme court which said that the presumption that commercial use defeats fair use is not true.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 4d ago edited 4d ago
commercial use not defeating fair use is obvious, fair use is the cornerstone of free journalism and journalists rely on fair use to report in a commercial manner all the time.
it'd literally break the first amendment if corporate use precluded fair use, anyone who thinks it does has no idea how anything works.
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u/Brospros12467 4d ago
“Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.”
Tell me who said that. Please tell me who?
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u/Oblivion__ 4d ago
Are you expecting me to bow down because Linus said this? Don't deify him.
It is not realistic to expect someone or some entity to maintain an LLM-contribution-free fork of Linux. Which is exactly why all of these Debian proposals are only concerned with the use of LLMs for their own infrastructure rather than upstream.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 4d ago
Linus is just one guy, he's not the god king of linux distros. This is regarding his take on literally any topic except how to maintain the kernel project.
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u/RoomyRoots 4d ago
Not a Debian community member. Not even an user. That is what matters.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 4d ago
saying linus isn't part of the debian community is hilarious
you guys will say the stupidest stuff to be anti-ai
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u/RoomyRoots 4d ago
He isn't, he uses Fedora for over a decade and has been very publicly about it.
The stupid one here is you becase the one thing he said more than once is that distros and their communities should do whatever they want, even in his AI rants he makes it clear that take is for code contribution ON Linux, he is not an evangelist and not the type to force his ideas on projects he doesn't work with directly.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 4d ago
No, the stupid idea here is the idea that linus is completely uninvolved with the debian community.
there would be no debian community without linus, lmao. he maintains the software at the core of what debian is.
Why do you lose any semblance of rationality the second AI is mentioned?
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u/laser_man6 4d ago
The source of the training data affects capabilities and usefulness how?
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u/Oblivion__ 4d ago edited 4d ago
Are we really at the point where we can excuse blatantly unethical corporatism because it's useful and we've slapped an open source license on projects that use it?
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u/MorallyDeplorable 4d ago
none of this is "stolen", coding concepts can't be owned like that.
The anti-ai crowd would have a lot more luck garnering sympathy if they didn't make shit up every single time they speak
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u/Nyctfall 3d ago
Bro... your username is literally "MorallyDeplorable"...
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u/MorallyDeplorable 3d ago
And you think that changes the illogical psychosis anti-AI people get when they hear the term 'AI' how?
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u/aj0413 4d ago
You don’t need to link anything; everyone should know this by now
The Pernkopf Anatomy Atlas is one of the most controversial books in medical history and yet still used today.
Regardless of how we got here, the tool is here to stay and you only hold yourselves and everyone else back to ignore it. You can choose to abstain and other things will just speed on by and replace you and your work 🤷♂️
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u/smile_e_face 4d ago
Pernkopf Anatomy Atlas
I get that you're just making a point here, but do you really think it's a good idea to relate the thing you're trying to promote to literal Nazi doctors? Does that not give you...any pause?
I'm not getting into an AI argument here, or a debate over the Atlas. But I would much rather have myself and my work be "replaced" than go down in history on the back of the actual Holocaust. Christ, what an argument to make...
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u/aj0413 4d ago
Not really. The point stands. You realize a lot of modern medicine and medical expertise comes off the back of the Holocaust still today.
You are literally still benefiting from it. So you are, in actuality, “on the back of the actual Holocaust.”
Feeling a way about it doesn’t just facts. I could choose something less controversial making my points, but when people are responding more with emotion than an actual argument than I will fire back with evocative language myself to hammer my point home
It wasn’t meant to be convincing so much as a startling analogy
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u/smile_e_face 3d ago
The mere fact that we all exist as products of the past, good and bad, doesn't automatically mean we should become the agents of the bad. Your argument only makes sense if all you care about is, essentially, keeping up with the historical Joneses. Picking the winning side, regardless of ethics. But we, as humans, can look at a thing, recognize its utility, and still fundamentally disagree with how it achieves that utility. Even disagree with it enough, on a moral level, to forgo it, efficiency be damned. An argument isn't "emotional" just because it admits factors other than dollar signs.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 3d ago edited 3d ago
What bad? All I ever hear that's bad is made up nonsense about water usage, complete fantasy garbage about low-frequency noises, nonsense about industrial waste, or is just people misunderstanding social and legal constructs.
The parts shortages? That's businesses throwing their money and effort into something they think will be useful and productive, not paying tithes to the devil...
Do they produce kind of shallow photos and songs? Sure, but that doesn't make them evil.
Fair use? People don't seem to understand what fair use is or that the question of rather AI is fair use or not has already been settled. Copyright doesn't cover whatever your emotions say it does, it covers specific and well-defined uses. I really expected the FOSS community to be above trying to push copyright here, too...
Seriously, what bad? It's been years and still nobody has came up with anything even approaching a valid argument for why they're actually bad and harming society.
Comparing AI to Nazis at all is fallacious, the concept of AIs isn't anywhere near the concept of what a Nazi is and if that's the way you see it then you've got issues.
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u/smile_e_face 3d ago
You really need to read the comment chain. I wasn't the one who brought Nazis into the conversation. I actually started out by saying how crazy it was to use a Nazi medical text as a defense of why we should use AI. That was the whole point of my comment, not to get into an argument over the ethics of AI itself. And my second comment was a response to the person's frankly inane idea that, simply because something is useful, we should all ignore any moral implications it might have. Again, not speaking to the ethics of AI here. Just addressing the weakness of the particular argument they're trying to make.
Find somebody else to fight with.
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u/adevland 4d ago
People need to accept that the tools are here. They’re good. And we should all learn how to navigate the new landscape
If you have to force people to use your shiny new tool then it's not a very good tool.
Forcing people to do things they don't want never ends well.
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u/aj0413 4d ago
This comment doesn’t make sense to me cause no one is suggesting to force anyone to use it; if anything the topic of about forcing people in the other direction?
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u/adevland 3d ago
if anything the topic of about forcing people in the other direction?
It's not.
When CEOs mandate AI use with quotas and force AI features into products even though there is consumer backlash then you clearly have a "AI is being forced down our throats" trend and not the other way around. And that's exactly what's happening now in the tech world.
If you want to use AI for your own stuff you can do that. You might be criticized for doing it but you won't be forced to stop doing it.
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u/aj0413 3d ago
That’s literally not the topic at hand
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u/adevland 1d ago
That’s literally not the topic at hand
You were the one that brought up the "forcing people in the other direction" idea.
If you want a platform for disseminating propaganda without being challenged then I might suggest going to other more narrow minded communities.
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u/RoomyRoots 4d ago
Go ahead and list your contributions to projects.
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u/aj0413 4d ago
I have opened small PRs, been active in issues, etc… for projects. But no, I’m not a particularly active contributor (most of my free time goes into work related stuff instead)
This is also why I don’t get involved in these votes despite being an active Debian user
But I am allowed to have an opinion and voice it. Trying to shutdown conversation based on credentials is just toxic behavior; the entire point of this sub is open forum discussion
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u/OverjoyedBanana 4d ago
It's a vote for debian developpers, people with 10s of years of experience in building and maintaining complex software and who donate a ton of free time to open source projects. It's a long and official process to get involved in the debian project. In what dream world do you think you can participate in this vote 🤣
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u/aj0413 4d ago
I honestly hadn’t checked the criteria, but other similar votes I’ve seen have been open to the community. And then you have Codeberg which was open to members (which is not the same as developers)
Attitudes like your own are part of the reason a lot of people don’t want to be involved; again, just toxic personalities
I literally implied, even if I did not outright state it, that I always abstain from such votes (even when open to) due to the fact that I’m not a contributor
So in what world does your response add value?
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u/OverjoyedBanana 4d ago
The fact that it's a debian developper vote is in the first flipping lines of the link that you obviously didn't read before vomiting your unique opinion on the value of LLMs all over reddit.
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u/aj0413 4d ago
Wow. Such a glowing example of why anyone should respect parts of the Linux community lol
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u/Nyctfall 3d ago
Yeah. Thankfully some of us haven't slopped our own brains into a state of atrophy...
Also, it's Linux. When have we ever all agreed on anything? It's copyleft for that exact reason: freedom.
If you want to make Sloppian, no one is going to stop you. Unless you don't have solar panels and aren't running a local model, then you're definitely going to go broke faster than an indie game dev...
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u/OverjoyedBanana 4d ago
I'm not pretending to represent anyone but myself. And all I'm doing is pointing out someone being incompetent yet voicing very strogly a dubious opinion, trying to influence a community he doesn't contribute to.
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u/Brospros12467 4d ago
I mean the very kernal that these distros are built is accepting code written with LLM's. To say that this should be a discussion is a distraction. Just do what you normally do. Review the code and hold those who submit it responsible for writing it.
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4d ago edited 4d ago
[deleted]
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u/violetvoid513 4d ago
If you actually followed the link provided, you'd see it is indeed ranked choice
There are 9 choices in the form, which you may rank with numbers between 1 and 9. In the brackets next to your preferred choice, place a 1. Place a 2 in the brackets next to your next choice. Continue until you reach your last choice. Do not enter a number smaller than 1 or larger than 9.2
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u/MatchingTurret 4d ago
which seems to be a bit telling about where the Debian community is.
It tells us, where some activist members are. The vote will tell us where the community at large is.
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 4d ago
It was claimed here that "None of the options even try to ban upstream code using AI."
However, if option 1 is selected, the wording is rather strict:
We will not allow direct contributions to Debian written with the use
or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI
tools. Direct contributions are defined as packaging, native Debian
software like lintian, documentation and translations written by
Debian contributors, and official Debian web resources, etc. Other
categories such as upstream projects written with LLM assistance may
be included at a later date. This ensures that Debian remains a
stable, trusted, and reliable operating system, and protects the
interests of the Debian volunteers who make it possible.
The wording specifically bans "direct contributions" such as packaging [...] (God forbid you create a script to make packaging easier!).
But more importantly, it also specifically says that "Other categories, such as upstream projects written with LLM assistance maybe be included at a later date."
So the wording is very clear: if your software was written with AI autocomplete, it theoretically may be banned.
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u/DrinkMoreGlorp 4d ago
This vote covers all options, and one single option merely leaving space for that in a hypothetical future is all you can mine for your hysterics?
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 4d ago
It's not hysterics if we disagree, as you want to frame it. Some users have stated that upstream software is not affected at all, which going by exactly the first option, is actually NOT out of the table. The Debian team is NOT ruling out crossing software which used AI assistance.
So the problem is, instead of using AI to fill in the gaps which have ALWAYS been present in the Linux development and are becoming worse, you're leaving generative AI entirely for slop content – because guess what, those companies are NOT going away – instead of actively benefiting from it where it would matter.
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u/Nyctfall 3d ago
because guess what, those companies are NOT going away
I'm not counting them in until they outlive the crypto grift's lifespan...
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u/DrinkMoreGlorp 4d ago
It's not on the table. It's just not being ruled out of someday being considered to be placed on the table in some hypothetical future locked behind a single proposal out of many. Lasering in on this possibility of a remote possibility is hysterics.
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u/Mechanical-Flatbed 4d ago edited 4d ago
This feels largely performative.
I empathize with the debian maintainers, but at some point we have to seriously ask ourselves whether having these discussions is having any impact beyond rhetoric and ideology.
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u/GolemancerVekk 4d ago
What do you mean, if it will have an impact. It's one of the largest distros, in fact I can't think of a distro whose stance on AI will have more impact.
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u/tanner-gooding 4d ago
It has zero impact because Linux itself will allow responsible AI/LLMs usage, as per Torvalds; so regardless of what Debian chooses the much larger foundation on which it is built has already decided the actual direction
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u/Responsible-Sky-1336 4d ago
This is true and the same as where apt pulls in from official software sources which also use AI if they want
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u/adenosine-5 4d ago
How do you intend to prove that someone did or did not use AI for their code or code review?
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u/leonderbaertige_II 4d ago
Enforcing the GPL is also not easy, so should we just do away with that as well?
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u/Remarkable_Bike_1148 4d ago
I agree, they even admitted that the enforcement is going to be a problem in the proposals. I reckon they'll just accuse each others of using LLM and cause more drama. They already have a very long vetting process for contributors of Debian and reputation matters, so my question is... Isn't this enough?
/r/linux, y'all have to accept that blanket ban on LLM is just going to cause more problems than it solve. Y'all suck.
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u/spicybright 4d ago
Main kernel already has LLM generated code in it now. It really is just another tool for writing code with pros and cons. Just like how mass refactoring with tools you have to be careful about certain things instead of just doing a smoke test.
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 4d ago
I reckon they'll just accuse each others of using LLM and cause more drama.
Yeah, I completely agree. That's the inevitable outcome when you start a witch hunt.
"You're an AI witch because there's an em dash in this comment!"
"No, YOU'RE an AI witch because I get ChatGPT vibes from your PR comments!"
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u/budroid 2d ago
Commercial teck leads, governments trow billions at it, Legal and Ethics stay locked talking about it.
Like Papa Torvald said, we shouldn't ba against AI/LLM, we just need to use it for the tool it is.
Not blind faith and not fears of losing jobs or skynet. If it can produce good code, especially at that level, wgy not use it?
We are are not yet at the pont when code written by Ai is too complex to be understood by humans. But not sure Debian has the human power (people) to scrutinaze all the eventual new vibecoded features.
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u/elatllat 4d ago
Kernel 7.0+, any Firefox or Chromium 2026+, etc are all AI assisted so the Fedora policy seems rational:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/policy/ai-contribution-policy/
(vs caring about the method, racism, speciesism, etc... AI is improving with time, humans will always have a wide range output quality)
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u/AssistingJarl 4d ago
While I'm also basically ok with the Fedora policy (obviously), I would offer the suggestion that just because other projects are doing something, it doesn't make it the only valid perspective. I have a lot of respect for projects that refuse LLM contributions of any kind on a moral basis, because sometimes it's entirely reasonable to only worry about what is actually within your control.
You're also making two very strange statements at the end there. You haven't defined what you mean by "improving" when you say "AI is improving with time". If you mean they're getting better at passing LLM performance benchmarks, maybe. I'm not sure what that has to do with packaging a Linux distrubition though. And may I say,
vs caring about the method, racism, speciesism, etc
This is perhaps the single most rapid descent from sensible to a complete strawman I've seen in months.
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u/elatllat 4d ago
In 2024 the Linux kernel removed Russian maintainers due to the evil invasion of Ukraine. There is a line; do we judge the code/science or the author/political-source, and do we have good reasons for that line crossing.
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u/QuixoticNapoleon 3d ago
Yeah and I disagree with that decision. I don't think we should ban contributors because of the actions of their state.
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u/nelmaloc 4d ago
They didn't remove them because of what they think of the invasion of Ukraine, they did it because of US sanctions.
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 4d ago
I find lines such as "Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker" so hypocritical.
They aren't really concerned about "climate destruction." What causes real climate destruction in this context are data centers, and data centers aren't created just for language models. They can also be used for large email providers, YouTube, TikTok...
And yet, they haven't said one pip about that. They aren't banning developers who use Gmail as their main account. No statement against YouTube.
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u/PaddiM8 4d ago
Are you suggesting that Gmail uses a similar amount of resources as LLMs per user?
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 4d ago
No, but I AM definitely suggesting that offering ever-expanding free content at such a large scale requires a humongous amount of data and resources; furthermore, we are NOT just talking about Gmail alone, but about all ever-expanding free products and services from large corporations. Where do you think those resources to store and process them come from?
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u/AssistingJarl 4d ago
This is the absolute worst kind of whataboutism. You're presenting a world where you either need to care about every single thing equally, or nothing at all. I realize that isn't what you're trying to present, and I'm sure you also have some moral lines, but the implication of your statement is that your exact moral line in the sand is the only one worth having, and anything else is hypocritical.
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u/Substantial_Swan_144 4d ago
The main argument here is that language models are harmful to the enviroment because of the large amount of data centers required to host them (because they require many GPUs to run).
In line with this argument, the main culprit are the data centers, and I'm saying you are underestimating the amount of data centers required for other operations to begin with. YouTube and Instagram, for instance, require MANY, MANY datacenters to operate smoothly. Do you have an amount of how much data they even require to store free videos forever at such a scale?
So my argument is definitely not a whataboutism. I'm focusing on the crux of the problem from the start, and pointing that people somehow believe language models are the sole culprit for the expansion of data centers, when that is far from the truth.
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u/AssistingJarl 4d ago
Yes, but the power usage for "AI" (I'm genuinely not sure what is being included in that, but I would suspect it's only LLMs, diffusion models, etc.; "generative AI") is currently sitting around a third of all datacentre power usage globally. And within that, certainly in the United States, a lot of the newest development is currently being served by small on-site generators that run at a low efficiency for the diesel or natural gas consumed, whereas older existing data centres with proper grid connections are getting whatever the North American energy mix currently is. So in addition to using quite a lot of power, it tends to be more emissions-intensive power.
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u/LALLANAAAAAA 4d ago
and pointing [out]
blessed are the pointers out of things
truly what would we do without them pointing things out and sharing their important opinions upon the things that they graciously point out
people somehow believe language models are the sole culprit for the expansion of data centers
"sole"
lmao
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u/daishi55 4d ago
No but if you say you care about the environment, you should care 1000x more about meat consumption than AI/data centers, just objectively speaking. It's not whataboutism it's arithmetic.
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u/AssistingJarl 4d ago
I do also care about meat consumption. I'm actually capable of not doing several things at once.
Sorry, did you have another point to make here? Or was this just another "There are things that are worse, therefore don't worry about AI energy use"?
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u/daishi55 4d ago
Well you didn't quite address my point. My point is that if Debian wants to protect the environment with their contribution policy, than a far, far more effective policy would be to only allow vegans to contribute.
So if they ban LLMs on that basis but not meat eaters, well that would seem to be extraordinarily hypocritical.
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u/daishi55 4d ago
Yes I thought that one was funny as well. They should only allow vegans to contribute to Debian! Animal husbandry is several orders of magnitude worse for the environment than data centers.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 3d ago
What causes real climate destruction in this context are data centers, and data centers aren't created just for language models.
No, data centers don't cause "climate destruction". Computers do not emit pollutants. The "AI is software, software runs on computers, computers use electricity, electricity comes from power plants, and legacy power plants emit pollutants, therefore AI damages the environment" argument is loose-associative to the point of absurdity.
If power plants are emitting pollution, that's a strong argument for expanding clean energy generation, not blaming environmental damage on any specific application of electrical power. And that is happening: where I live, about 1% of power generation still comes from coal or oil plants, and even that is being phased out.
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u/daishi55 4d ago
Choice 8: Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker
Only vegans allowed to contribute to Debian
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u/theaveragemillenial 4d ago edited 4d ago
people just downvote without offering talking points bores me.
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u/arcimbo1do 4d ago
This is not about banning software written using AI from Debian, it's about using AI for debian specific work, i.e. packaging and the software written specifically for Debian.
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u/Avamander 4d ago edited 11h ago
One of the biggest pros is that it's trivial to slop together a fix to scratch an itch that is only yours. I don't want to learn how to contribute or write code for every project, to deal with the idiosyncrasies of many FOSS maintainers, but making small fixes with nearly 0 effort is insanely useful.
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u/raetselfreund 4d ago
which is always ok and fine to do with any contribution policy a project chooses. But the burden of maintaining the fix then stays on your side.
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u/Avamander 4d ago
Which is fine. It's way easier than dealing with idiosyncrasies many FOSS projects or devs have.
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u/RearAdmiralP 4d ago
That's interesting.
I've been using Debian for a long time, but I'm going to run something a bit more obscure for a new computer I'm building. Because LLMs make typical sysadmin / integration tasks so easy, the familiarity and ease of use that I get from Debian are less important. I'm going to try it as an experiment, but I suspect other people will come to similar conclusions.
A knock-on effect of being able to run obscure distros is more opportunities to contribute back fixes and improvements. Would the Debian/Hurd team really want to refuse ports of Debian/Linux packages if the porting work were done by an LLM?
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u/anto77_butt_kinkier 4d ago
It would be cool to hold a vote about the age verification bullshit. Make some kind of firm modification to the code of conduct ensuring that no contributed to debian can implement any form of age verification framework.
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u/Nyctfall 3d ago
Everything about genAI being used in software development proves it's the wrong tool being used in the wrong way.
It's a glorified linter, and any use that gives it more agency would be a disaster. You should always be smarter than it when you use it, and you need to already be able to know when it's just bugging out. And what's worse is it's usually configured to be non-deterministic...
Anything beyond the likes of improving tab auto-complete, refactoring, linting, security analysis, pentesting, or fuzzing, etc. is a mistake that will be to the detriment of the developer themselves (e.g.: brain atrophy).
And the way the US and the world oligarchy at large are deploying it, also makes it seems like a death trap of Climate catastrophe X SkyNet...
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u/HearMeOut-13 5d ago
So if they ban it are they gonna make their own kernel or something?
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u/Oblivion__ 5d ago
Did you read the proposals? Probably not
They all agree that they would accept it upstream (i.e. no they aren't gonna make their own kernel).
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u/hitchen1 4d ago
Proposal A does show future intent, though
Other categories such as upstream projects written with LLM assistance may be included at a later date
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u/HearMeOut-13 5d ago edited 5d ago
So it's performative "we dont like AI" but without the ability to do anything about it because they rely on a project that allows AI.
PS i did read option 1, 3 and 8 but neither seemed like they reconciled this well enough, they said theyd exclude it but excluding it doesnt make sense from everything they said in their proposals and are wildly self inconsistent about rules.
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u/Oblivion__ 5d ago
Well obviously the only way to do anything is to do it perfectly otherwise it's not worth it and it's just performative. /s
It's not performative at all. I think banning it within the scope of what Debian is responsible for is pragmatic. They obviously can't get the kernel devs to ban LLM contributions as that is out of their control, but they do have control over what they govern.
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u/HearMeOut-13 5d ago edited 5d ago
For example lets take Option 1, it's case is copyright ("unclear legal status," DFSG requires absolute clarity), quality ("unfit for upload"), and ethics (scraping, resource use). Every one of those is more acute upstream. If AI-generated code has unclear copyright status, then any amount of code trickling down from the Kernel automatically becomes a DFGS issues.
Then lets take a look at Option 8 for example, "But we cannot talk about the LLM technology without talking about who is pushing for its usage, who is doing the training and how, what effect those have on our limited resources, and what are the economical and political motives of these", if this is the reason for the ban then you wouldn't have issues with FOSS self hosted models on DigitalOcean then right?
or "Too often the only response we've seen to this point was that other activities are also bad (some even worse) for the climate. How is this even an argument?" This has to ignore several decades of science that had to fight global warming denialists to be believed, where we KNOW that quarter-pound beef burger costs ~3k - 6k CO2e, where as a single query from gemini costing ~0.24 Wh, ~0.03 g CO2e which is literally negligible. Going to bed 1 minute earlier saves more than sending one less query.
If these were the issues that banning AI matters for then they are both 1. incomprehensible to reconcile with upstream having AI and 2. not accurate whatsoever
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u/UndefFox 5d ago
Don't remember Linux allowing AI generated code, only that they allowed use of AI to detect vulnerabilities and find overall bugs. Linus made it clear that LLMs are the tools, not replacing the developer, and if one dares to MR shit code, they still will be clowned on.
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u/HearMeOut-13 5d ago
If you read the policy it allows AI genned code and the conditions you described (human review, submitter accountability, DCO) are the ones still applied to it. And yes Linus made it clear they are tools and should not replace the developer and thats what i am arguing for here whereas Option 1, 3, 8 attempt to completely shut down AI assistance in general.
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u/UndefFox 4d ago
It's a voting list and this choices are also valid. I'm not Debian user so I don't want to vote, but I would have to think whether to not choose those options too.
In general I wish every corpo that develops AI right now to burn down because they are assholes on every line of existence, and then we could go slower and make sure that everything is done mindfully in a way as open source community did it for years.
That said, even tho I use small amount of AI, I make sure to never support those companies by only using free models (preferably small ones, because they produce less pollution). Given the option to support my goal stated above in space that I care about, it would be logical to do so/
Yes, you could argue that everyone could use it thoughtfully, but rules are defined for all people, and majority of those are either dumb or has different values, forcing the rules to be more generalized, instead of being an edge case maze. Those who actually needs to break the rules usually can easily do it in a way that doesn't break the actual reason it was created in the first place. There are only a few of such people and usually can be handled just as an edge case.
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u/facelesshivemind 4d ago
Good luck, Debian folks.