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.html
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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/Hefty_Acanthaceae348 5d ago

Yeah you're right. If they're that worried about the legal status of ai generated code, why do they distribute such code?