Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?

lproven

Posting this because I want people to vote -- and ideally vote for a total ban.

ivandenysov

> Debian is a large and complicated project: the release announcement for version 13 says it has 69,830 packages, which take a total of 403 GB of disk, and contain 1,463,291,186 lines of code. So, suitably, it is a large and complex poll. Surely these are not just Debian-owned packages. Whatever Debian decides won’t apply to packages not owned by Debian

alfiedotwtf

Crazy how divided AI is here on HN… We’re almost to the point where the average non-technical person uses AI daily (just like phones and the internet were once only used by the technocrats) without blinking, it will be ubiquitous and universal in adoption, yet comments here on HN from people that have the vantage point of seeing AND understanding how AI works, and who can also predict the inevitable integration of AI in society, have got their collective heads in the sand to the point they’re soon going to sound like conspiracy theorists.

jnwatson

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.

ragebol

> If Proposal H has a weakness, it's that it does not distinguish between local and cloud-based LLMs Is the energy usage so different between local and cloud inference? Both require electricity, the local option even more than the better optimized cloud variant even perhaps. How either is powered makes the crucial difference I suppose. Both can potentially run on solar as well as gas or nuclear. It's the training that takes the most energy, and that needs to happen for locally running or cloud models regardless. What am I missing here? EDIT: Proposal H mentions "LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem" I was thinking solely about energy usage, but there is of course also water usage. A local setup is not water-evaporator cooled most likely.

nekusar

I do use and run my own LLMs locally. But I understand why Debian might ban it, under just 1 reason: LLM outputs cannot be copyrighted. That alone starts to invalidate the GPL and other FLOSS licenses. It overall weakens the project the more you accept. And companies (MS, Amazon, etm) will gleefully loot anything marked with "LLM" as a free-for-all. Until the whole copyright situation can be finalized, I'd understand for any FLOSS org to refuse all LLM code. (Its also the same reason why Oracle also forbids all LLM code in Java and their DB. Same reason.)

VCFundedGenYer

Total ban please. This nonsense needs to end. Linus Torvalds is weakly vibe coding the kernel, that's bad enough.

ImaCake

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.