Retiring from the Project (vv221)
lists.debian.org
  • antianarchist@sopuli.xyz
    17·
    1 hour ago

    Initially sent to debian-private, shared here because I want the consequences of Debian fully embracing fascist-backed technology to be known.

    That seems to be a bit far reached and naive. Hopefully Antoine isn’t driving cars, because there are several brands that were supported by Nazi’s at one time in the past.

    Besides that, I think it is good to have a discussion about the use or LLM. I just think that the reason here is a bit unusual.

      • antianarchist@sopuli.xyz
        11·
        31 minutes ago

        Same goes for PayPal, and yet everybody keeps using it. Not saying that this is a reason to use Frontier models. But calling the whole technology fascist is simply not true.

  • Wobble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    422·
    8 hours ago

    “AI scrapers break the web, to use this page you’ll need JavaScript enabled.”

    The ironic…

  • notSys@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    513·
    2 hours ago

    Fascism is when AI.

    How is AI fascist?

    Is it ultranationalist? Rejecting democracy? Anticommunist or antiliberal? Third position in economics? Anti egalitarian? Racist? Traditianolist socially?

    I could maybe see an argument for it being anti egalitarian, but besides that, LLMs have none of those traits.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      8·
      2 hours ago

      Most developers using AI/LLMs use corporate owned LLM’s, not local models (and almost certainly never a local model that is trained in a way to not introduce legal plagiarism into a FLOSS project).

      Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of the big tech companies that host them (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are owned by right-wing CEO’s who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated and receive lucritive government contracts. Many of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

      • notSys@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        19·
        1 hour ago

        That’s still not fascism.

        Also, your logic is flawed: Some CEOs are right wing, so they would be willing to support fascism (because as we know, right wing = fascism)

        In my opinion CEOs of most tech companies are just opurtunistic.

        • viking@beehaw.org
          6·
          44 minutes ago

          Opportunistic people supporting fascism and actual fascist true believers are indistinguishable in how they behave, right? The only difference would be if/when fascism is no longer an opportunity to make money.

        • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          7·
          41 minutes ago

          If a corporation helping a fascist government surveil and detain citizens in opposition to the government securing more totalitarian power isn’t fascist then… What would you consider fascist behavior?

    • HieroProtagonist@feddit.org
      14·
      37 minutes ago

      You don’t understand… ‘fascism’ today means something along the lines of ‘I don’t like it’, like ‘gay’ in the 90s…

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
    922·
    9 hours ago

    The without disclosure part tells everything you need to know here. If it’s such a benign and maybe even beneficial thing to do then why are you hiding it? What possible reason could you have not to label that? In an open source Community shouldn’t everything like that be known?

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
      12·
      7 hours ago

      I wonder what’s the reason to make it optional? I think I’ve seen this approach with other projects as well. Isn’t transparency and accountability a good thing? Also, this kind of information helps immensely when reading pull requests or silly bug reports. And Debian acknowledge there might be licensing issues. So it might become some sort of liability to them once it taints everything and we can’t even tell?! So why? What’s the upside? Adorn oneself with borrowed plumes and not being forced to disclose the fact? Or too much bookkeeping?

      • EnsignWashout@startrek.website
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Eye contact is benign for most of us. We still give it a context warning in civilized circles. It costs us almost nothing, and lets people make an informed decision what you engage with.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
        151·
        6 hours ago

        Not really worth discussing - it’s not benign, and it can be made purposefully not benign by a third party without notification or knowledge. A third party who has already demonstrated a penchant for world domination, both technologically and physically.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
          4·
          6 hours ago

          I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.

          I mean, I would think, at least. It seems to me that most of the people in charge of big projects are usually FOSS purists.

          That’s part of the reason why AI scrapers are breaking the small web. FOSS purists really have no significant defense against it aside from Anubis.

          Real DoS protection comes from capacity, which costs serious dollars, especially in this day and age where botfarms can be hired by the hour for rather cheap and record-breaking attacks seem to happen like monthly.

          The alternative is using a CDN, but there are none that align with FOSS ideals. And for CDNs to be really effective, you need them to break open TLS and handle the decrypted traffic, which raises privacy concerns on top.

          But anyways…most license agreements would make it a requirement that if you’re using an open-source model, that it be properly attributed, right?

          • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
            6·
            44 minutes ago

            I should hope that open source developers are exclusively using open source models that are trained on open source projects.

            Most developers who use these tools (even FLOSS developers) appear to be using the corporate owned models that were definitely trained on both proprietary source code and code that is incompatible with the GPL license. Some EU courts have also already judged that LLM code cannot be copyrighted, which also means it cannot be licensed as GPL.

            Currently, all code generated with an LLM has a 3 to 10% chance of unknowingly plagiarizing the copyrighted code it was trained on, and any FLOSS project that uses it is making a huge gamble that their codebase won’t be scanned by corporations in the future looking for violations to sue about, shut down rival FLOSS projects, etc.

  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
    1142·
    9 hours ago

    Respect to Antoine. Having principles that are worth a damn is a rare trait amongst developers these days.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
      1235·
      9 hours ago

      Weird that he didn’t care when Linus Torvalds adopted basically the same policy to the kernel that serves as the foundation of the main Debian distribution. I have an inkling that there is more going on at Debian, not LLM use alone.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
        394·
        8 hours ago

        didn’t he? have you checked?

        the main thing is that it’s an upstream problem. the linux kernel is used in nuclear missiles. if you want to stay on that kernel you have to take what you are given. in your own organisation you can at least try to change things.

  • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
    71·
    6 hours ago

    and the death blow is when more like-minded developers do the same… there won’t be enough left that would vote to change policy to try to lure some back.

  • Wydamn@social.linux.pizza
    493·
    10 hours ago

    @ProdigalFrog
    > “Pretending to have a “neutral stance” when faced with fascism is not neutrality, it’s active collaboration.”

    Bars. I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision, I hope Antoine gets to keep his peace undisturbed.

  • chris@l.roofo.cc
    137·
    8 hours ago

    Well what would the disclosure requirement improve? It’s unenforceable and it just gets in the way of evaluating the code based on quality. Every code should have high standards. Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.

    If a project allows llm contributions then disclosing it will only make people weary of the wrong things. Putting a badge on it is not helpful anymore if it’s allowed. I have seen good llm code and bad human code.

    • EnsignWashout@startrek.website
      6·
      2 hours ago

      Bad llm code is just as bad as bad human code.

      Bad LLM code is worse than bad human code. LLMs sanitize out markers that humans use to catch and correct mistakes.

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      The Free Software Foundation of Europe recently published an article detailing why it’s legally quite important for developers to disclose and carefully catalog which code was created by LLMs.

      https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

      Recommendations for AI usage in Free Software contributions

      With these issues in mind, the recently published Recommendations When Using LLM-Backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions by the SFC outlines some of the legal difficulties for copyright and licensing that generative systems have created for software developers who wish to write, maintain, or contribute to Free Software projects.

      Notably for the purposes of this article, the SFC recommends the full recording and disclosure of how and when an AI tool was used to assist in the creation of a contribution. As stated by the SFC:

      “FOSS project leaders cannot make good decisions about LLM-gen-AI policy if they cannot survey which contributions were assisted, and how much they are assisted. Part of the contribution process should (at least) include a disclosure of what LLM-gen-AI system was used, its version (as these system change over time), and a brief description of how the system assisted the contributor. This information should be included in a machine-readable format in commit logs."

      Indeed, such disclosure can be an important foundational step to allow for the accurate assessment of the copyrightability of code that has been assisted or generated by AI tools, in order to assess their licensability into Free Software. Open and clear disclosure is a helpful step for the Free Software community to maintain a healthy licensing ecosystem, which is currently threatened by the legal uncertainties that come with the advent of generative AI.

      Additionally, it is worthwhile for developers to document in some capacity the extent of human work that they have done in their software projects, whether it be the writing of code, the selection and arrangement of components within the project, or the extent of human modification of machine generated content.

    • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
      312·
      7 hours ago

      Code is a liability. The only thing that balances it out is people who understand the code. The people are the asset.

      If you contribute LLM-generated code but not your understanding, you’ve essentially taken out a loan in the maintainers’ names.

    • trebach@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      6 hours ago

      There were 8 options and Debian has ranked choice voting. This was actually around the middle of the spectrum of options, so with half voting most to least restrictive and the other vice versa, the middle of the road choice won.