I have been using Linux for over 8 months now, and my primary distribution of choice was Debian.
Debian recently conducted a community vote on allowing AI contributions, and it ended up allowing responsible AI contributions.
What is this responsible? How can AI commits be responsible? There are thousands of reasons to not use AI, and the primary reason is AI is a thief.
How did you react to Debian’s decision? Did you switch distros? Which one was your option, and why?
Also, when the Linux kernel itself allows AI commits, is there any practicality in a Linux distribution strictly limiting or restricting AI commits?
I have no serious usability issue with Debian now but am concerned about the use of AI even in my Linux distribution. Should I keep going with Debian or consider any other distribution, as I only have 8+ months of experience as a daily Linux user? I tried almost all Linux distros and am comfortable with everything except Void Linux and highly complex ones like Gentoo.
Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?
No, because there’s no such thing as “AI”. It’s irrational to try to remove something that doesn’t exist. People will continue using computers to compute regardless.
On the other hand I don’t think developers should accept generated slop. I guess that’s what “responsible” means.
Unless you literally programmed every component yourself, you can’t get away from some level of LLM involvement, even if the distro itself bans it. There is no 100% certain way to check code for LLM use. So if a developer doesn’t disclose it, and the maintainers accept the code, it’s in the official codebase now.
There’s a deeper problem though, which is a problem of demarcation. What counts as an “AI contribution” to you? Obviously vibe-coding is. But what about more subtle uses?
What if a developer uses an LLM to read the code and suggest a way to make a certain contribution, but it never actually generates any code, the developer implements the LLM’s suggestion completely by hand. Does that count?
What about if a developer hand writes 95% of the code themselves, but that last 5% they aren’t as confident in, so they have the LLM generate it. Does that count?
What if an extremely experienced developer uses an LLM to generate 100% of the code, but spends hours going over every single line making sure it is correct and making little tweaks before submitting the code?
What if a developer writes the initial code 100% by hand, and only uses an LLM to go through and optimize the formatting and performance before submitting it?
What if a developer writes 100% of the code by hand, but uses an LLM to generate a bunch of unit tests and documentation?
These are just some of the ways that LLMs can be involved in the process of software development, and most of these wouldn’t have any real chance of being caught by a maintainer doing some sort of scan to detect LLM usage.
I’m not saying these uses are or aren’t justifiable/acceptable, but my point is it’s often not clear what people consider to be “over the line”. Almost no experienced devs in the FOSS world are advocating for the 100% vibe-code/token-maxing approach. But lots of them are comfortable with using LLMs in similar ways to what I listed earlier.
The tough truth is that you’re almost certainly already using software that has LLM involvement at some level. Short of going full Amish mode, or using completely pre-LLM software in some kind of air gapped setup, you’re not going to be able to avoid it.
Man, my friend said he made a web app. He asked me if it would be secure to deploy. I check the front end and immediately check if his formatting was readable.
Two javascript blocks embedded: one was beautified, normal, tabbed out.
The other block was debeautified, which JS developers do so people can’t steal their code (as if that works these days).
I said, “You didn’t make this.”
“Yeah I did!”
“You used AI.”
“But I wrote the prompts!”
"To prompt a computer to steal two separate snippets of javascript from actual developers to achieve the goal.
"Man, this is fine for prototyping, just to demo an idea. But I wouldn’t release this to the public, because if I saw that, I am going to use the tools I already have, and my LLM to speed up the actions, and I will show you how hackable the app actually is.
“You didn’t make a steak. You ordered a steak and got a McRib with carrots.”
He responds, “Does it look ok?”
“Yeah, we can use the css, and we can adjust that as needed, but if your frontend is this sloppy, I wouldn’t release the backend and take customer data. Hell no.”
What if someone does a copy/paste of a code snippet from a google search and then modified it for their own purposes?
According to the grifters, this is “AI” but it’s not and nobody cares. There is no boundary for something that doesn’t exist (“AI”). That’s fundamental to the grift.
The linux kernel is compromised. Lets use NetBSD!
I hope this whole thing makes hurd grow.
Hurd’s tAInted too :/
Wait… WHAT!?
Yea, apparently AS is now being heavily used in its development. I need to look up the reference, but I read a while ago that AS-assisted ‘coding’ was used for making SMP work in Hurd.
I’ve spent quite some time pondering my options now that OpenBSD, my former OS of choice, has been slowly but surely giving in to the hype, and I can tell you that currently the most sensible option seems to be (I’m not joking) 9Front.
tf is “AS”?
also, how does 9Front compare to NetBSD?
Artificial Stupidity.
9front is not UNIX (but its predecessor was also created at Bell Labs). It is ‘many of the ideas surrounding UNIX, on steroids’. The user experience is waaaaaay more integrated because the whole system is developed by the same small team.
On the flip side: forget about browsers and many ‘modern’ programming languages.
Omg artifical stupidity is so fire!
Interesting… I’m tempted to try it out.
Are the BSDs any better in regard to browsers and stuff?
No. It’s not practical.
No matter how you feel about ai or how you think it is wrong, the increased tempo of bug fixes and security patches necessitates either manpower beyond what is feasible for volunteer projects or the use of ai tools.
It’s an arms race and you can’t opt out without just missing the patch schedule.
thanks, TrollAccount69, that’s genuinely what I thought too!
How about posting alongside a… friend?
Aye, I could do that
Yeah, all the FOSS communities have been starving for labor since they started. Likely the best we could hope for is that the true experts at the top are maintaining a critical eye on what makes it in.
Even in that case we need to hope they’re using ai tools because they’ll be seeing a volume of cases too high for their previous workflow.
It’s a mix right?
In some cases, you have absolute neophyte coders trying to shove unvetted vibe code in. There needs to be some bars on entry for what is submitted. I’d like to see at least mid level code in the same style and verbosity and not something that’s on the fringe of the vibe where it failed 15 times and ended up shoving some great atrocity in for a lack of context. As long as the person asking for a PR isn’t trying to insert horrors, inspecting the input using tools isn’t the worst thing either.
Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?
It’s not possible to have a 100% no-LLM-coding-involved Linux distro anymore now that the kernel itself is welcoming LLM-assisted contributions, but it’s still possible to say that everything which the distro produces itself will not use AI.
How can AI commits be responsible?
What Debian means is: by reading what it produces and not just blindly accepting it but having humans review it carefully. The quality of LLM-assisted software is highly variable. Experienced people like Debian and Linux kernel developers are much less likely to publish very bad slop than inexperienced developers who are newly able to make a thing work well enough to ship it.
I am concerned about the extent of Debian’s embrace of LLMs but I still have a lot more confidence in them than most other distros (especially small hardcore-anti-AI distro projects lacking sufficient developer capacity to even keep up with security updates).
I expect we’ll be seeing lots more things like this non-upstreamable-because-AI hardware enablement and distros like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) will either either adopt more nuanced LLM policies or be forked.
I am doubtful about if there will be any serious distros with hard LLM bans in a few years from now. But also, perhaps the bubble will have burst by then, so hosted inference won’t be so cheap and the use of LLMs will probably be quite different.
the primary reason is AI is a thief
This is not the primary reason for most people, I don’t think. I think the fact that it increases complexity while reducing human understanding is the biggest problem; it’s possible (easy even) now to produce mountains of good-enough-by-many-metrics source code which the person doing the prompting has very little comprehension of. The fact that it is also a plagiarism machine is far less of a problem than this. (There are a litany of other problems too of course, several others of which I would also rate as worse than the plagiarism aspect.)
Yeah the Debian Project’s position makes a lot of sense to me. They’re basically saying that they won’t be wasting a bunch of resources trying to seek out LLM generated code and purge it and will instead just focus on making sure ALL the code is up to their quality standards. This will likely mean they spend a lot of time sifting out slop anyway, and will allow them to keep just focusing on making the project do what it’s always done. Ship a stable, usable, and free distro.
There will never be an AI free Linux distro again since it’s allowed in the kernel. I would certainly prefer to use a distro that doesn’t allow vibe coded programs though. That junk is unmaintainable and will be abandoned when the creator can no longer afford the tokens.
Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release – “Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned.”
maybe that could be because people do a small project then get bored and doesn’t apply to something like kernels?
Let’s see if the Kernel is abandoned in a few months, seems likely
thief
If you advocate for further expansion of “copyright” oppression, you deserve microsoft windows.
This. So much.
I am old enough to remember many people on the Internet questioning the entire concept of copyright and reacting to it with free licensing, defense of torrent sites, founding Pirate Parties.
Now I read that the primary reason to reject AI is that it is a “thief”??? In the era I described above, someone wrote a song with the lyrics: copying is not theft, stealing a thing leaves one less left, copying it makes one thing more, that’s what copying’s for…
Copyleft is a hack of copyright that ensures rights to users of software that you wouldn’t have if there was no copyright. Software is different from other creative works like music and books in that it does computing. Sharing a binary file freely isn’t enough - you need the source code to keep it maintained or change it to your will (through collaborative efforts). You prevent others withholding the source code via that copyrighted license.
You can reject the unreasonable sentences of copyright infringement, the illegality of breaking locks on your own hardware, or the long copyright terms while still promoting copyright for copyleft’s sake. Companies lobbies for those laws to prevent "stealing’. throwing people in jail or fining them into oblivion - are they going to undo all that? Can I share Disney films without going to jail now?
while still promoting copyright for copyleft’s sake.
What the hell.
Copyleft means “the absence of copyright”, not “copyright wielded by radlibs”.
I don’t think “the absence of copyright” is the best description of copyleft. I believe “the right to copy is left to the end user” better encapsulates the spirit.
Words have different usages among different groups of people. Wikipedia seems to support my use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
TIL radlibs’ holy scripture smears copyleft. The page reads like it was written by a bourgie copyright advocate.
I should have known, radlibs’ holy scripture was founded by ancaps after all.
That’s many new words for me, seems some groups of people also have no usage of words that others use!
I value software freedom; basically being in control of your own computing. I dislike others taking my code and then denying their users the same freedoms they enjoyed. If not for that I could do without most of Copyright as it is today.
You don’t get what copyright is at all. The bourgie propaganda seems to have convinced you that “copyright protects you from copyright and if it weren’t there nothing would protect you from copyright”
For some people, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of
capitalismthe copyright system.
Copying… is fuuuuuuuuun 🎶🎵
GPL may call itself “copyleft”, but legally it is dependent on copyright to be enforceable. In the first place, the whole point of licenses like GPL is to ensure that when people take from the commons, they also give back to the commons. The way AI gains its ability to generate shitty code undermines this, and so is ideologically very much at odds with Linux and the wider FOSS world.
GPL wields the copyright system against itself, like a virus. The goal is the complete destruction of the copyright system and the liberation of all software.
It won’t exactly be able to accomplish anything like that if it’s been undermined no matter what the mechanism of its enforcement is.
This is the GPL’s trap card. When it gets undermined, the “copyright” system loses its credibility.
That was the idea, at least. Seems like there’s people who double down on their belief in copyright in response. But that’s their own fault.
The usual saying applies: “It’s easier for them to imagine the end of the world, than the end of
capitalismthe copyright system.”
Copyright is a deprivation of freedom, and the GPL comes using this rules to turn around them. I won’t defend copyright. AI comes with more important problems, such as ecology, and creating monster private companies that have far too much power.
The tool in itself can really be usefull when well used. Many people use it and get nice results. Many people abuse it, and many people abuse themselves with it. It is true with a hammer too. I don’t think “hammer-free” is a feature, even if their are many domain in which I don’t see the point of using a hammer (and so “made with a hammer” isn’t a feature either).
Also, I can’t find any example in history of a technology that was successfully banned despite being usefull. Some have been regulated, such as nuclear industries, but that was not perfect and needed a continuous and hard strugle. The strict “no-AI” movement has already lost its battle, at most we could get regulations, maybe…
The thing is, if all other things remain the same, an absence of copyright will also be used by the wealthy and powerful to further enrich and empower themselves and as a tool of oppression.
From the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition:
#34 War is good for business.
#35 Peace is good for business.
You cannot have internally consistent, principled view on copyright without also having a compatible view on the economy. And even then, the economy needs to come first; you cannot start destroying load-bearing pillars, no matter how ugly, without first getting everyone out of the house.
The tool in itself can really be usefull when well used. Many people use it and get nice results.
The way I see it, there are two kinds of people: those to whom AI is utterly useless because it just ends up taking more time and have them burn through their cognitive endurance faster, and those to whom it would be irresponsible to let them use it, because it would prevent them from finding better solutions for the busywork they’re letting the AI do, and they just end up creating a lot of needless maintenance overhead.
But more importantly, being “useful” to certain individuals is not the same as being good for society. Which brings us back to it undermining licenses like the GPL, which would further enrich and empower the already advantaged.
Also, I can’t find any example in history of a technology that was successfully banned despite being usefull.
CFCs? Asbestos? The bans on them aren’t perfectly enforced, but nevertheless, the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking and the number of people dying of asbestos-related lung cancer is reducing, so they do have value.
The strict “no-AI” movement has already lost its battle
Even if it were true, that would be no reason to stop trying or to stop saying the truth: No matter useful you experience it as being, you are causing harm. To yourself, to the field, to society.
You can call it “the truth”, but I will call it “the dogma”.
It only appears dogmatic to someone under the mistaken impression that technologies are value-neutral. Make no mistake: even if every generative AI model were open-source and you could run on your own hardware, it would still be a technology that empowers the already advantaged far more than anyone else.
How? If every model was open source and you could run on your own hardware?
GPL (and copyleft generally) gets way more attention than it should. In the wild, MIT and similar permissive licenses are by far the most common. Linux is on GPL, but that may be a historical artifact as much as anything. I don’t know if Linus himself would choose it if he were making the choice today.
The wider FOSS community, in my experience, leans permissive rather than copyleft. The copyleft people are just loud.
EDIT: To be clear, when I say I don’t know what choice Linus would make today, I don’t mean that I’m skeptical he’d choose GPL. I literally just mean that I don’t know. He’s been quite clear that he’s not a principled believer in copyleft, but it does have real advantages for a project like the Linux kernel.
100%.
What is this responsible? How can AI commits be responsible? There are thousands of reasons to not use AI, and the primary reason is AI is a thief.
I feel like you aren’t actually asking a legitimate question and are just trying to soapbox, but this is covered by Debian here: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/08/msg00005.html
As far as what the consequences of failing to follow that policy is, it would be covered under the Debian code of conduct: https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct_interpretation.html
NOTE: I am not a Debian user. I just performed a basic search to find the answer to that question.
I’ve been using Debian for a long time and honestly, I’m not going to worry about this too much as of today. We got that decision, yes. But I don’t think I’ve seen any consequences, yet. And I always try to judge people by what they actually do. Less so by what they say.
I say that the last word hasn’t been said yet. On this whole AI thing. We still got many Linux people who don’t really appreciate AI. The entire community isn’t really fond of it. We got people who say there isn’t a way to make use of it responsibly. I have a hunch there’s more to this story. But only time will tell. Until then I’m going to continue using Debian, just like I have for the past 10-15 years. I trust the community distributions, they faced other challenges before. And usually they’re not half bad at facing challenges and ultimately doing the right thing.
Doesn’t have to be easy. Sometimes we’re headed the wrong direction for a while. But what matters IMO is the result. And I’m positive they’ll find some way to deal with this. I don’t think AI fits Debian’s identity at all. Would be a big surprise to me if they don’t realize it as well.
AI is a tool. You already trust the developers to build an operating system with the tools available.
From the Debian announcement
The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance. The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor’s responsibility for the work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian. Blindly accepting or uploading AI-generated material without appropriate human review is inconsistent with Debian’s established development practices.
It’s quite clear they don’t allow vibe coding. As you say, the kernal itself allows AI contributions in a similar way.
If you’re worried about the ethical aspects of AI then you’ll probably have to move to NetBSD. If you’re only worried about quality this is a non issue.
Trust is 3 parts; authenticity, competance and empathy. Trust is broken if any of those are insufficient.
If others believe AI creation and AI use hurts people then leaving that unaddressed makes one appear to lack empathy.
“Quality of code” ultimately boils down to judging how it may effect people (reading it, changing it, using the software it compiles to). To worry about code quality is only to care about people. Only caring sometimes is inconsistent - it questions their character.
You make good points however you can’t stop a person doing something because it goes against your beliefs.
In this case the Debian developers had a vote and the majority agreed that using AI was ok.
I’ve read the post and they still have a code of conduct, they still have standards that they will keep. That’s good enough for me to continue trusting the devs.
There are 2 tools to stop someone from harming others: words or violence. If people disagree an action is harmful to others then we aught to use our words to discover who’s belief better represents reality.
I think using AI to write software could be okay but the AI in use today isn’t. AI makers circumvent our social licenses and redistribute our code covertly through a mathematical blender. Debian OS authors agreed that there are legal unknowns regarding the copyrightability of generated code and didn’t say AI was okay or bad one way or the other. Debain should already know today’s AI spits at our faces.
I’m not disputing that AI has severe issues. I think it’s more appropriate for governments to focus on effective regulation than open source developers disallowing useful tools.
The majority of governments are at least partially at the mercy of the usa government in this respect though, easily one of the most absurd, and corrupt governments on the planet.
Indeed! It’s more inportant than ever to switch to open source software, which is why i dont see the point in placing restrictions on developers.
ai will be the death of open source.
Didn’t every single option in that ‘vote’ include using ai though?
And didn’t they all seem like very deliberately long winded options, designed knowing that the majority of users would only read the titles?
It might be a tool, but it is naïve not take all of its externalities into account.
From tante’s piece:
Usefulness is not an objective, fully abstract property: A thing is not useful for everyone or in general but mostly just for specific people in specific contexts. And useful never comes for free.
But let’s take a step back and use a different example: Child labor. Child labor is very “useful” if you want cheap labor. It’s 100% deplorable to use it or accept it.
Edit: a good source of said externalities: https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware/src/branch/main/why_not_llms.md
Is using AI as bad as child labour?
I don’t believe so. But i don’t believe in copyright laws either. If a developer chooses to use AI it’s their choice.
Obviously best case scenario is they use a local open weights model. I believe this will be more commonplace in a few years.
I think a skilled developer using AI to improve open source software is a case of the ends justifying the means.
Edit: the link you provided highlights the problems with large capitalist corporations owning the compute power and generic AI use by the untrained population more than the issue of skilled developers contributing to open source software.
While these things are a problem i don’t believe a distro should stop contributions just because a developer consulted an LLM.
Analogies are comparisons of structure, not intensity. There are a lot of things that are “not as bad” as child labour, that doesn’t make them OK.
But i don’t believe in copyright laws either. Do you believe in the goals of the GPL? Because you have to admit, the way AI works, regardless of whether you frame it as “theft” or “copyright infringement” or not, is at odds with those goals.
GPL is a response to copyright laws. If there were no copyright laws we wouldn’t need GPL.
Prohibiton doesn’t work. Regulations need to passed by government bodies not open source developers.
You do realise that even if copyright were abolished, large, powerful corporations would continue to exist and even manage to use the absence of copyright to their advantage?
Without the GPL being enforced, a company like Microsoft could finally start digging a moat around Linux without constraints.
“Copyright” was made to empower and protect large corpos like microsoft.
If you think copyright “protects” linux in any way, you’re a fool.
It doesn’t matter what the reason for its creation is, you can make similar arguments about laws against assault and murder or the right to vote, what matters is what it’s doing in the current legal situation.
If you think that the end of copyright will suddenly render corporations powerless, you are beyond naive. Some will fail to adapt, undoubtedly, but many will not just adapt, they’ll be able to take full advantage of this new situation. Copyright isn’t the only mechanism they can dig a moat with, and as long as the economic incentives remain what they are, they will find a way and be no less exploitative. Meanwhile, the individual creator or indeed projects like Linux will lose what little protections they have and be completely at the mercy of these monsters. Forget exploitative contracts, they can just exploit you without one!
A better world without copyright is possible, it just doesn’t look exactly like this world, except without copyright. The abolishment of copyright is not an ideal, it’s a means to an end. But for those means to lead to a good end, how and when it happens matters. To cheer on a development because it nominally achieves what you believe is needed to lead to your ideal outcome, even when the way it happens would lead to an outcome that is in direct opposition of the ideals that lead to that belief in the first place, is a sign you’ve stopped thinking.
OpenBSD.
Come learn about computo.
Be free with us.
Can you share your experience with OpenBSD please?
Pour yourself a cup of coffee.
IN GENERAL: You will encounter much more friction in dealing with certain day to day tasks (until you configure everything) but unlike Linux you will find that the system is much easier to understand and therefore the fixes “stick” in your head a bit easier.
Overall, Linux is like going on a pleasant hike that has occasional 120° cliff faces you need to climb. OpenBSD is like hiking a mountain where you are at a consistent 45° angle. You’ll face challenges but the resolutions are understandable and internally consistent with each other, and you will find you’re own understanding of the system improves much more consistently through use.
USER EXPERIENCE: Desktop: You will be using X11 for the forseable future, particularly OpenBSD’s security oriented fork of Xorg. For the most part any knowledge of setting up an Xorg desktop will transfer with little issue and the applications one would expect to see in such a desktop are present. OpenBSD comes with a few built in window managers which all ere on the “classic” side of the house. Most notably is cwm (Calm Window Manager) which is somewhat inspired by plan9’s Rio.
Wayland is still experimental but there has been a good deal of progress here, DWL is at a point where it “mostly works” though it is far off from being the default. It is important to note that “being the default” actually means something in this space. The OpenBSD developers pride themselves on having and extremely secure and well maintained “base system” so the OS and it’s surrounding ecosystem encourages users to not deviate from defaults as much as possible. That being said Wayland will likely, eventually, become the default.
Applications: The ports tree is less comprehensive than FreeBSD and certainly less than Linux but there is a surprising amount of less commonly used software in there. Case in point, Librewolf is in the ports tree as of 8.0 current. For the most part you will find the tools you need with little issue though; Krita, Kicad, Emacs, etc. There is generally a tool to match your need, though you may need to adapt your workflow to the OS from time to time.
System Administration: This is where she really shines. OpenBSD is understandable; it presents a clean and comprehensible computing experience that invites you to fully grasp how your operating system works. Unlike Linux, which has to cater to a wide variety of use cases, OpenBSD’s tooling is simple and focused on a few specific tasks. In general OpenBSD leans heavily on being a UNIX-like and as a result understanding of Unix is directly transferrable to understanding of OpenBSD.
That being said, OpenBSD also suffers somewhat from being tied closely to its Unix roots so certain aspects of the base system can seem a bit “dated”. A few notable examples being limits on shared memory and concurrent processes being low by default and the default partitioning scheme not fully utilizing very large SSDs. Important to note here; all of these can be easily configured so it’s not that much of a headache.
Another area where OpenBSD is a bit behind, though it has not negatively impacted me, is its file system. FFS is serviceable but it is not a featureful or performant as the “cool kids” of FreeBSD and Linux (ZFS, btrfs). This is being remediated though (see below).
SECURITY: OpenBSD doesn’t have namespace or chroot based process isolation the way Linux or FreeBSD does. Instead it uses a novel approach in the form of two simple syscalls, pledge and unveil.
Pledge is used to limit the specific syscalls a process is allowed to make and when, unveil limits the portions of the file system that are accessible to the process.
Despite seeming less powerful than things like a Linux container these two primitives have proven to be remarkably capable of isolating and securing software used in OpenBSD.
That being said they do take some getting used to and can create certain headaches if you are not familiar. In general, whenever you download a package there will be a message about a new file in /use/local/doc/pkg-readme/; read it.
THE FUTURE: OpenBSD’s development is best described as communal. Users are somewhat tacitly expected to contribute in some way (bug reports, write ups, etc). Personally I like this as it creates a more tight knit and supportive community.
As a direct result of this, and the simplicity/understandability of the system there is a lot of “low hanging fruit” being attacked right now. As mentioned above Wayland is close to being stable and one of the developers for 9front (Ori Bernstein) is working on porting GEFS (the Good Enough File System) to OpenBSD which should bring OpenBSD much closer in performance to its peers in terms of file system. Vmm (the native hypervisor) just got multi-vcpu support in 8.0 and there are a slew of other minor improvements that are accruing.
THE COMMUNITY: The most concise way I can describe the OpenBSD community is “they respect your intelligence.” It is expected that you have read the man-pages and readmes for the software you are using, it’s expected you have an understanding of the guts of the system. This can seem gatekeepy or a bit conceited but allow me to present a counter argument. They don’t think you’re an idiot by default.
The community, as a result of its proximity to other areas in the “indie” computing scene, tends to carry a certain set of cultural markers. There is a lot of cross pollination from the 9front and Suckless communities and as a result you’ll interact more with that computing philosophy. In general the community appreciates simplicity, comprehensibility, and hackability.
CONCLUSION: It is fun, satisfying, comfy and, most importantly, AI free. Learning how the system works feels good partly because the barrier to learning the system and contributing to it is actually much lower than in other systems. I have come to love it, principally, because it has a certain degree of “humanity” that makes it a joy to use.
i love your mailing list, i learn so much about literally everything every single day from misc@
You may have me mistaken with someone else haha. That being said maybe I should start one lol
I’m talking about the openbsd mailing list lol
There are a few distros that do reject all AI code, which you can find in these two lists:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#linux-based (under the ‘Alternative Linux-based operating systems’ section).
Some links to anti-ai digital things:
https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html
https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index
https://www.newinlinux.com/ai-free-linux-distros-open-source-operating-systems/
f-droid repository: https://izzyondroid.org/docs/general/AppInclusionPolicy/#ai-policy
Also fuck_ai@lemmy.world
and antiaialliance@lemmy.blahaj.zone (maybe ignore this one though)
You have to format communities like this to get a link that gets you there on your local instance:
Handy tip, hopefully I remember that one
“How did you react to Debian’s decision?”
I deleted it, debian was thankfully not my main, just a backup/something of interest.
The ‘vote’ itself seemed dodgy, every option was going to ai in some form, or another.
Sure but why?
the primary reason is AI is a thief.
That’s the least important reason to not use AI. All property is theft, especially copyright!
There is a difference between people using AI to help write/maintain code that they understand, and slopcoding unmaintainable vibe projects.
I think it’s a bit the other way around. GNU, Linux and the Free Software community are very much about this copyright thing. We know it’s not right to do it like the other big companies so we try to make an effort here to make it not weigh down on the users or have the people steal, or abuse their power?!
Citations needed! The Free Software movement grew out of opposition to proprietary software, in a world where there was no copyright all software would be Free Software.
No, you miss the point. GPL is not a feelgood license. It is a license that tries to make the licensed piece of work better by exploiting the fact that the more it is used, the more it is likely that someone can improve it for everybody. So large corporations will contribute back their tweaks and everyone profits.
It is not some kind of utopic hack
I can’t tell whether that’s supposed to be opinion or a factual matter.
What I can say, though, is: it is some sort of utopia for me. It enables me as a user to run my own independant “cloud” services, my own social media. I get to use CAD software for free which my university used to pay some 5-digit sum for, I can have a random light show in my living room, “hack” all sorts of devices and command them to do whatever I like them to do. And a bunch of really useful stuff.
And then it also made me understand computers, learn programming… It’s transparent and I can look inside. And I’m fairly sure it’s part of who I am today, I probably wouldn’t have studied CS if it weren’t for Free Software and all the stuff it enabled me to do as a teenager.
And that wasn’t just to force big companies to do something… The community made a big effort to welcome me, gift me stuff, teach me stuff and we even had quite some parties and user meetings and those morals and the motivation to change the world really stuck with me.
So I got hacked and I believe in some utopia. I’m currently living it, at least for personal stuff, and to the extent we get to be free in the modern world with all its apps, spying, and tightening down things. And I’m probably not the only one.
That all is good and lovely. My point is that this is a side benefit of having an awesome community and most people when given the choice will help someone rather than gatekeep.
The main purpose of the license is exactly the one that is forcing facebook to contribute back to the kernel, because they want the enourmous firepower of all other competitors work, and would like that their own is easy to keep with future upgrades, so they contribute not only because they are forced, but because tit is the most efficient way for them to get what modifications they need integrated properly. 40 years of this gave us the current kernel.
So if ai tools help this process they will be used, regardless of how they work morally. Because most contributors to the code are developers payed by corporations.
I think I get what you’re saying. That is the purpose of the license text. I mean not just companies, everyone needs to abide by the rules. But yeah, that’s basically what that text does.
What I’m trying to say is: In my experience that’s not all there is to Free Software. I mean Linux famously started out “Just for Fun” and under a different (more restrictive) license. And it took a while before it got corporate attention. Before that it was used by individuals for their own individual benefit. And it still does both as of today.
And I tend to see that a lot. Software like the software I was talking about and a lot of stuff on my computer was started by individuals. They had an itch to scratch or whatever and just put it out there. Lots of projects I use don’t see any contributions by (other) companies and they don’t seem to care. They’re fine. There’s quite some nice large/high-profile projects out there which work the way you said. And that’s exactly how it should be like.
Guess there’s just a lot of reasons to publish Free Software. Some do it for profit. Some do it by themselves or in a small team. Some gets used by companies and companies contribute back. Some is done by students to learn, some because someone needed something to get a job done in their life and they’re a nice person… I also like the (A)GPL. I don’t expect my stuff to be picked up by anyone and that’s not why I write software as a hobby. But uploading it is mainly a gift to the world. Not for for-profit companies to capitalize on my work. That’s why I do copyleft.
So I think when I look at software like the one I mentioned, or the platform we’re currently using: Getting contributions back (by large corporations) might not be what the developers had in mind at all. It is however the purpose of the license text in the repository. That’s correct.
And regarding the AI tools: Yeah, I don’t think that’s noteworthy. AI is here to stay. It’s being used as of today and will be used in the future, the world doesn’t stop or turn back.
