Debian. Is. Love. 🌀❤️
That’s a month old. The voting period for Debian ends tonight, so check back tomorrow to see the news.
True; however, even the proposals that could allow inclusion of AI have severe limits to them (which is awesome IMO)
I disagree with your reading of the proposals. My interpretation was that only proposals (1) and (7) have severe limits on LLM use. Each of the other proposals allows LLM use with some very minor concessions or no concessions at all. It felt to me as though they were all worded very sneakily to try to attract votes from anti-AI developers while actually being very permissive, by waffling about the harms of AI in the preface before completely dropping the ball in the requirements section.
Removing all of the waffle, the proposals can be boiled down to:
- Completely outlaws all use of LLMs in Debian contributions, whether code or documentation or communication etc.
- Allows any and all LLM use provided that:
- the tools are not legally problematic
- the LLM output does not violate another copyright
- the contributor assumes full responsibility
- they’re not used for bulk operations without prior discussion
- private data is not sent to cloud services
- Allows LLM use for everything except for human-to-human communication. Also permits individual maintainers to ban LLM contributions to the project that they maintain (implying that maintainers may also permit LLM contributions to the project they maintain).
- This one is particularly pernicious since it also “requests” (as in, a non-binding encouragement) that nobody uses LLMs, whilst acknowledging that for decision makers this “will involve uncomfortable compromises.”
- Allows any and all LLM use provided that the contributor takes full responsibility, tags the contribution as LLM-assisted, and doesn’t use cloud services for private data.
- Says absolutely nothing of substance. 8 paragraphs of waffle to place no restrictions on anything but to say that contributors are already bound by the Debian Social Contract and existing rules, and that they should be held responsible for their contributions accordingly.
- Exactly as (5), but this time 9 paragraphs of waffle to say nothing of substance.
- “In order to safeguard the project’s mutual understanding, trust and respect, we disallow the output of generative AI as direct contributions to Debian.”
- 12 paragraphs of hand wringing about the climate boils down to: “this text is just a position statement. This said however, we appreciate the disclosure of LLM usage.”
So by my reading, that makes:
- Bans AI: (1), (7)
- Allows AI: (2), (4), (5), (6), (8)
- Allows AI with a restriction: (3)
Now read the titles of these proposals and their introductory preamble and ask yourself whether they are representative of the actual rules they will put into effect.
One reason more to stick to debian
Good, no more slop!
Good luck not using the kernel?
Debian is one contender I might migrate too, depending on how this all pans out and how other distros handle AI.
So, no more Linux Kernel? Lol?
You joke, but they have built experimental Debian builds on at least one non-Linux kernel. I don’t know how far an AI split in the FOSS community will go, but there are more options than you would think. And when the bubble pops, it’s more likely the people that still have money after will be the ones not in the AI camp.
The only people that will have money are the billionaires currently inflating the bubble
What has money to do with this?
Anyway, I personally rather bet on the project’s founder’s stance.
FOSS has had a funding problem forever, and AI has made it exponentially worse by increasing the review and maintenance burden on volunteer maintainers and the infrastructure burden with scraping and agentic build workflows. The projects that are surviving best are the ones that have a funding source, which is typically businesses that financially benefit from the software (there are of course exceptions).
When the AI bubble pops, companies are going to be pulling back on all spending, so I expect donations to FOSS projects/foundations to get tight. The ones that will still be spending are the ones that will still have money to spend, and I don’t expect diverse views on AI to be distributed equally across those survivors.
If a distro gets filled with LLMs and those require upstream resources whether for frontier models or to maintain and update local models, that requires money. Some for that potential overhead, but also funding to support the development to implement those features.
If one distro spends resources to implement LLMs and another doesn’t, when that bubble pops, the group that invested will likely have less money having spent more.
