I love Debian. An ol' rock ballad from the 90s
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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The only question I have is why. Genuinely.
Debian exists. It has existed for decades. It works. "Oh but AI makes it faster" so fucking what? We didn't need "faster" for years whilst it worked fine, it's not a product on a deadline.
That's true. Nonetheless the maintainers seem to see AI as a valid way to reduce their workload.
i'm actually a little surprised, given their history about being so hardcore about dfsg compliance.
This email from 2016 by jwz springs to mind.
I guess you want Debian to be the kind of operation that uses the work of others while blatantly and explicitly ignoring the wishes of the person who did the actual creative work.
I am increasingly of the opinion that all software developers and adjacent people are fucking scum unless proven otherwise.
boooo
Dammit. Need to find a new OS.
AI may be the one thing in life I find hard to boycott lmao.
This is good news; Debian is still the way to go for me:
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material. The Project does not seek to resolve these unsettled legal questions through this General Resolution, nor does it adopt a position on whether AI-generated output is, in whole or in part, copyrightable or derived from copyrighted works.
Responsible use of llms can't be achieved. Can you verify that all of your training data are square with its creators? If not, how is that responsible?
It can if you control the training data, or if the data is public domain.
But I get your point. You can say all the Diamonds you use are conflict free, but out of the thousands you have, how do you know some have not slipped in.
At what point do you say you did a good enough job, and at what point is it too contaminated?
Like many things, it difficult to draw a line, so its up to communities to set a reasonable standard.
Code should've never been copyrightable from the start. It's basically the compute equivalent of a recipe. That aside, almost all modern transformer models are trained on generated data by this point, how would we even apply traditional copyright to that? Whole thing needs tossed and retooled. Entire economic system with it tbh, just slows innovation, and despite what you might believe it doesn't protect the little guy, it just allows massive corporate conglomerates to buy up everything and control for what will be pretty much the extent of your lifetime.
algorithms and processes are not copyrightable. Code is an expression of algorithms, and thus is copyrightable. If anything, that's the stance that the entire movements of Free Software and Open Source are going with to function, so this sounds not a good idea even if it is a good ideal.
They're moving to this as it's the only defense against oppression, but copy left was intentionally designed to combat copyright because the core founders of open source disagreed with it and the oppression it was causing in the software development community. Imagine if a recipe for Chilli dogs was copyrightable, but not the concept of Chilli dogs. That's downright silly.
Code is rather expressive, it's copyright-able for good reason, you can often tell who wrote what via the style and the way the code was written, and the methods used.
I disagree entirely. I grew up when the conversation around if code should even be copyrightable was happening, and at the time to an extent it made some sense, but the entire copy left movement was intended to combat the copyright of code in the name of open source because copy righting code is both stupid and baseless. Imagine if for loops were copyrighted? That's what you're essentially arguing unless there's some sort of vague subjective measure you're using to determine when something is copyrightable. The entire thing is just oppressive and does not help the people involved that actually deserve benefit and protection. I'm not saying to cut lose and allow rampant theft but copyright as currently designed and implemented is objectively broken and untooled to the tasks of today, stifling innovation and protecting corporate interests above creators and actual developers.
Can you verify that it didn't reproduce any code that's proprietary or has more restrictive licenses than your own?
That's the main issue for FOSS.
The complement/ reverse is true for companies that produce proprietary software (but they won't care, sure.)
In a nutshell, it looks like AI disclosures are encouraged, but not required, and AI usage is encouraged to be human reviewed, but not required. They have also stated they will not allow the use of online AI services for security reasons (but how this will be enforced I'm not sure, since they are relying on the judgement of contributors)
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This is like saying “Responsible use of highly infectious diseases.”
Like... In research for vaccines?
Great example. It’s good for that, it must be good universally, so let’s use it for everything. Let’s force people to use it for everything, because it has one legitimate and specific use case scenario.
Yeah, let's use infectious diseases for socialising with people.
Cough on the face of the person you want to say hello to... Wait... People already do that.
Ohh you mean like the prize winning Folding project that google just shut down so that they could reassign all the staff to work on Gemini instead?
The project that reached its goals and is the basis for new projects? Yeah
Lmfao
This bro doesn't understand AI, protein folding, or code at all but speaks as an authority on it all.
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