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Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

theregister.com

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Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#51

Post by roryirvine »

Jenk wrote: post #15
roryirvine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is huge - that's why so many other distros use it as a base! So, yes, all those packages are maintained either by an individual Debian Developer or a team of them. There are third party repos, but they're (currently) neither as widespread nor as commonly-used as those for other major distros. This vote won't affect them, and you might potentially expect to see their use grow if one of the harsher options in th…

The point though, is that they package 3rd party applications and libraries. If they ban AI, they won't stop packaging apps and libraries from parties that do use AI. They wouldn't even know who does or doesn't.

Sure, this is (mostly) about direct contributions to Debian.

Proposal C does discourage use more broadly but acknowledges that many upstreams take a different view and that it would be impractical to ban them from using it.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#53

Post by ImaCake »

surajrmal wrote: post #42
ImaCake wrote: post #33

What an interesting cultural artifact! I note no proposals in favour of "let it rip" which is presumably because that would not be a reflection of Debian philosophy. I do think the aggressively anti AI proposals are themselves un-cautious in the extreme.

It's one thing for a maintainer to use AI, and another to review AI code sent your way. The latter has been proven to be unsustainable, low value, and ultimately a challenge for open source. Everyone acknowledges this problem exists and some corrective action is required to mitigate it.

Thats certainly an argument about the problems with LLM usage. But it's not a meaningful reply to what I said unless I am missing something.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#54

Post by revolvingthrow »

lproven wrote: post #45
jve wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know few CEOs/Business owners who are non programmers (well one was exposed to it/learning, but didn't go down that path) and they do use AI for various work and non work related things. One told me how at manufacturing plant someone solved some unpleasant process to input specs into machine for manufacturing by having AI creating the automation. His comment to me was: People who don't embrace AI will eventually be…

Uhuh. And what happens when the price goes up by an extra zero on the end? And then another one? And then the cloud stuff goes away because all the vendors go broke, despite the price rises, and you have to switch to using local models? That is, models that are hugely slower, unless you have a computer with hardware tensor-math acceleration, which costs 10x more because of the chip famine? And then, suddenly, those l…

>And what happens when the price goes up by an extra zero on the end?

>And then another one?

Well so far the price trends towards going down by the zero at the end. Inference isn’t expensive, there’s a whole laundry list of providers to choose from. It’s training (for everybody) and salaries (for US labs) that are expensive.

>and you have to switch to using local models?

Many companies are interested in that, if for no other reason than to avoid uploading secret sauce to we-totally-dont-train-on-your-chats-pinky-promise API endpoints. A mid sized company can cough up $500k for dxg b200 which will be useful for years and years and the only ongoing cost is electricity. Put glm 5.3 on it and it’ll zip along for a number of employees at the same time.

>And then, suddenly, those local models cost an absolute bomb to license, because the companies that bought up the wreckage of the original model creators are trying to recoup their spend?

How are they recouping anything on a mit licensed model released into the wild? There are plenty of models released by "who?" companies and the cost to download those is zero.

>Meanwhile the company is being hit by nuisance litigation from people whose code the bots plagiarised

Any day now

The doom scenario makes no sense in the race to the bottom that’s happening now. China being the other big entity that’s invested in AI makes all the what-ifs about litigation and plagiarism moot; they will gladly offer everybody inference for dirt cheap, if for no other reason that they’d like it if you gifted them your IP that they will then use to outcompete you with their manufacturing prowess.

The genie’s out of the bag. AI is never going away, and we all need to adapt whether we like it or not.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#55

Post by tomxor »

jnwatson wrote: post #17

Kind of arbitrary since it doesn't impact their upstreams. The very first thing I used GenAI for was fixing build and CI pipeline issues, exactly the drudgery no one cares about. Today, LLMs are excellent at the yeoman's work of maintaining patches across multiple versions and upstream, which is what I imagine a lot of Debian devs do. Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.

> Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.

Trust, stability, security. The reasons many people run Debian.

Although I think the main incompatibility in philosophy here is in "hand that off", e.g. direct agentic usage eroding opportunity for human judgement, which seems unlikely to be adopted anyway. The realistic proposals are essentially AI use with various guard rails and rules to preserve that human judgement (my interpretation).

Actual Proposals (scroll down): https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#56

Post by someaccount1234 »

lproven wrote: post #46
someaccount1234 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you cannot use Linux, Firefox, Chromium, Python, Rust, LLVM and so on. Hurd can't be used either. Maybe you have to switch to FreeDOS?

NetBSD is right there.

NetBSD has no alternative to Chromium, Firefox, LLVM, Rust or Python. They use AI-generated software too, including in the base system.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#57

Post by someaccount1234 »

lproven wrote: post #45
jve wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know few CEOs/Business owners who are non programmers (well one was exposed to it/learning, but didn't go down that path) and they do use AI for various work and non work related things. One told me how at manufacturing plant someone solved some unpleasant process to input specs into machine for manufacturing by having AI creating the automation. His comment to me was: People who don't embrace AI will eventually be…

Uhuh. And what happens when the price goes up by an extra zero on the end? And then another one? And then the cloud stuff goes away because all the vendors go broke, despite the price rises, and you have to switch to using local models? That is, models that are hugely slower, unless you have a computer with hardware tensor-math acceleration, which costs 10x more because of the chip famine? And then, suddenly, those l…

> And then another one?

But what when salaries would increase by factor 100-1000? This would make AI use even cheaper. (About as realistic...)

> And then the cloud stuff goes away because all the vendors go broke, despite the price rises, and you have to switch to using local models?

In this case there will be cheap inference hardware on the market as someone will sell all those assets. They don't disappear when a company goes broke (object permanence).

We could also speculate what would happen if all hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba, ...) would suddenly be broke. Again, about as realistic a scenario.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#58

Post by lproven »

someaccount1234 wrote: post #56
lproven wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NetBSD is right there.

NetBSD has no alternative to Chromium, Firefox, LLVM, Rust or Python. They use AI-generated software too, including in the base system.

This is simply not true.

NetBSD includes Firefox:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/firefox...

And Chromium:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/chromiu...

And LLVM:

https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/lang/llvm/i...

And Python:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/lang/python...

In fact, the only thing that you mentioned that is not in its ports collection is a Rust compiler, as far as I can see.

Code generated with LLMs is explicitly forbidden.

I wrote about that last year:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/18/gentoo-and-n...

It's in the guidelines:

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

« Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core. »

I don't know of any such thing getting approval.

Yes, like OpenBSD, things might get grandfathered in. OpenBSD includes `tmux`. Tmux includes bot-assisted commits. I wrote about that too:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/05/25/openbsd-79-a...

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#59

Post by steveklabnik »

lproven wrote: post #58
someaccount1234 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NetBSD has no alternative to Chromium, Firefox, LLVM, Rust or Python. They use AI-generated software too, including in the base system.

This is simply not true. NetBSD includes Firefox: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/firefox... And Chromium: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/www/chromiu... And LLVM: https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/lang/llvm/i... And Python: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/lang/python... In fact, the only thing that you mentioned that is not in its ports collection…

You are mistaken about what your parent is saying: they're saying that if you want a system untouched by LLMs, you must provide alternatives to those things, because those things have LLM-generated code in them.

Re: Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

#60

Post by gatlin »

silver_silver wrote: post #50
jnwatson wrote: post #17

Kind of arbitrary since it doesn't impact their upstreams. The very first thing I used GenAI for was fixing build and CI pipeline issues, exactly the drudgery no one cares about. Today, LLMs are excellent at the yeoman's work of maintaining patches across multiple versions and upstream, which is what I imagine a lot of Debian devs do. Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.

There are ethical and environmental concerns arising simply from use and contribution to the industry which many people take seriously

I agree with those concerns while also recognizing they also apply to virtually all of the technology we are using to argue right now.
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