Debian permitting use of genAI:
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Debian permitting use of genAI:
1) I am surprised. Perhaps I am naive, but I was of the impression that Debian would be one of the last distros that would want this.
2) I agree that the legal position varies around the world, and is subject to change. I don't know how easy it would be to remove genAI code if the risk profile changed.
3) I am surprised how little weight is given (by anyone, not just Debian devs) to the environmental harm of genAI. Perhaps that is justified as being too remote to be of direct concern.
4) As a long term Debian user impacted by this decision, I need to make a decision. Not doing anything is a decision in itself, even if a temporary decision. Moving from Debian would be many days of work, but that doesn't mean doing so is the wrong decision for me. Aargh.
@neil It's such an interesting question, and I see several angles. As a user who can't code, Claude Code has let me make things which are incredibly niche, just for myself - a huge positive. On the other hand, would I want AI code in my OS? I wouldn't trust it that far, yet.
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Debian permitting use of genAI:
1) I am surprised. Perhaps I am naive, but I was of the impression that Debian would be one of the last distros that would want this.
2) I agree that the legal position varies around the world, and is subject to change. I don't know how easy it would be to remove genAI code if the risk profile changed.
3) I am surprised how little weight is given (by anyone, not just Debian devs) to the environmental harm of genAI. Perhaps that is justified as being too remote to be of direct concern.
4) As a long term Debian user impacted by this decision, I need to make a decision. Not doing anything is a decision in itself, even if a temporary decision. Moving from Debian would be many days of work, but that doesn't mean doing so is the wrong decision for me. Aargh.
@neil
I guess the point of the policy
was just that licence can't get in the way of them shipping CDs -
@neil It's such an interesting question, and I see several angles. As a user who can't code, Claude Code has let me make things which are incredibly niche, just for myself - a huge positive. On the other hand, would I want AI code in my OS? I wouldn't trust it that far, yet.
And we're just choosing to ignore the horrifying externalities, yes?
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@neil The question is if there are any distributions that committed not to use AI. Neither now, nor in the future.
And further more Debian is practically the standard on servers.@AlienJay @neil it's not Linux, but #NetBSD has a policy forbidding what they call "tainted code": https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html
#Gentoo has a similar position.
Both allow individual exceptions to be made after careful review of all concerns.
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@neil Debian was the OS I planned to switch to, in part because I didn't see this coming either.
I probably should have given just how much it's infiltrated everything else and my cynicism over it.I agree with what Elementary said: "you still have the problem of major underlying infrastructure including the Linux kernel itself. I think we have to take a harm reduction approach right now and do our best with what we have control over"
I don't have control over much, but I can change my OS.
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Debian permitting use of genAI:
1) I am surprised. Perhaps I am naive, but I was of the impression that Debian would be one of the last distros that would want this.
2) I agree that the legal position varies around the world, and is subject to change. I don't know how easy it would be to remove genAI code if the risk profile changed.
3) I am surprised how little weight is given (by anyone, not just Debian devs) to the environmental harm of genAI. Perhaps that is justified as being too remote to be of direct concern.
4) As a long term Debian user impacted by this decision, I need to make a decision. Not doing anything is a decision in itself, even if a temporary decision. Moving from Debian would be many days of work, but that doesn't mean doing so is the wrong decision for me. Aargh.
For a reasoned, contrary point of view please see this thread:
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Debian permitting use of genAI:
1) I am surprised. Perhaps I am naive, but I was of the impression that Debian would be one of the last distros that would want this.
2) I agree that the legal position varies around the world, and is subject to change. I don't know how easy it would be to remove genAI code if the risk profile changed.
3) I am surprised how little weight is given (by anyone, not just Debian devs) to the environmental harm of genAI. Perhaps that is justified as being too remote to be of direct concern.
4) As a long term Debian user impacted by this decision, I need to make a decision. Not doing anything is a decision in itself, even if a temporary decision. Moving from Debian would be many days of work, but that doesn't mean doing so is the wrong decision for me. Aargh.
@neil I think "environmental harm" needs to come with some sort of disclaimer.
In the US, yeah, I have no idea how the way they're building datacenters there is legal.
Here in Sweden they run on 100% renewable energy and don't use up water.
I feel the whole environmental debate around LLMs has centered on what happens in the US, with very little actual data shown.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use
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@tschenkel A cabin in the woods, at this rate.
@neil we're going to need a lot of log cabins @tschenkel
I'm about to set up a new media server (I wish I'd bought the ram last year), and was already looking for a non-systemd distro; then Linus says slop is OK in the kernel, so I'm seriously wondering if I'm moving to a BSD. I've used a BSD-based NAS distro before, but there are a few things I don't know about right now, and it's also another way of thinking about the whole system setup & updates (I /like/ apt as a package system)
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@voidandcozy @neil I haven't just yet but I've given myself a shortlist to explore. AerynOS, redox, 9front, elementary and haiku
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Debian permitting use of genAI:
1) I am surprised. Perhaps I am naive, but I was of the impression that Debian would be one of the last distros that would want this.
2) I agree that the legal position varies around the world, and is subject to change. I don't know how easy it would be to remove genAI code if the risk profile changed.
3) I am surprised how little weight is given (by anyone, not just Debian devs) to the environmental harm of genAI. Perhaps that is justified as being too remote to be of direct concern.
4) As a long term Debian user impacted by this decision, I need to make a decision. Not doing anything is a decision in itself, even if a temporary decision. Moving from Debian would be many days of work, but that doesn't mean doing so is the wrong decision for me. Aargh.
@neil oh no, decision need here too...
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@neil Debian was the OS I planned to switch to, in part because I didn't see this coming either.
I probably should have given just how much it's infiltrated everything else and my cynicism over it.I agree with what Elementary said: "you still have the problem of major underlying infrastructure including the Linux kernel itself. I think we have to take a harm reduction approach right now and do our best with what we have control over"
I don't have control over much, but I can change my OS.
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Debian permitting use of genAI:
1) I am surprised. Perhaps I am naive, but I was of the impression that Debian would be one of the last distros that would want this.
2) I agree that the legal position varies around the world, and is subject to change. I don't know how easy it would be to remove genAI code if the risk profile changed.
3) I am surprised how little weight is given (by anyone, not just Debian devs) to the environmental harm of genAI. Perhaps that is justified as being too remote to be of direct concern.
4) As a long term Debian user impacted by this decision, I need to make a decision. Not doing anything is a decision in itself, even if a temporary decision. Moving from Debian would be many days of work, but that doesn't mean doing so is the wrong decision for me. Aargh.
@neil I am not overly surprised by this, it is a pragmatic rather than political approach. Banning LLM use is a lot harder (impossible) to police than the whole Debian "free software" stance.
It is a little disappointing that Debian of all distros couldn't have chosen to take a moral high ground on this though, as futile as it may be.
LLM/GenAI is super accessible, it has replaced search for many developers, because search is broken, the next step to having it generate code is a small shift from copy-pasting the odd line from docs or websites. So much coding is gluing together boilerplate and examples anyway. They could have "banned" GenAI use in Debian code, but this would never have stopped GenAI use in Debian code.
The current environmental and economic issues of LLM/GenAI are worth making a stand about though.
As a fairly pragmatic Debian user of some 30+ years I am conflicted. Though as a developer, for work purposes, I do make use of LLM tech — so I am myself tainted.
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@mindpersephone @neil Having been anticipating starting from scratch anyway I'm trying to look at it as a chance to have some fun and frustration. I'm sure I'll learn a lot from it (I always used to find niche distros good for that, rarely found they work out the box) and I now have the free time for good old fashioned fucking around
Hannah montana linux first tho obvs
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@voidandcozy @neil I haven't just yet but I've given myself a shortlist to explore. AerynOS, redox, 9front, elementary and haiku
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@neil I am not overly surprised by this, it is a pragmatic rather than political approach. Banning LLM use is a lot harder (impossible) to police than the whole Debian "free software" stance.
It is a little disappointing that Debian of all distros couldn't have chosen to take a moral high ground on this though, as futile as it may be.
LLM/GenAI is super accessible, it has replaced search for many developers, because search is broken, the next step to having it generate code is a small shift from copy-pasting the odd line from docs or websites. So much coding is gluing together boilerplate and examples anyway. They could have "banned" GenAI use in Debian code, but this would never have stopped GenAI use in Debian code.
The current environmental and economic issues of LLM/GenAI are worth making a stand about though.
As a fairly pragmatic Debian user of some 30+ years I am conflicted. Though as a developer, for work purposes, I do make use of LLM tech — so I am myself tainted.
@neil hm, I should have said near-30 yers lol. My first Debian install was 1998! So more like 28 years. But... details. It has been a long old time, albeit with a slight Ubuntu dalliance on desktop for a bit.
The developer perspective is the hard one right now. LLM generated code is entering the "corpus" of knowledge whether we like that or not, whether we use the tools or not. Probably a majority of developers in the world are using it, with those of us uncomfortable with it being a small niche, and those who take the harder stance of not touching it being an even tinier niche.
It is simply no longer possible to guarantee anything is free of LLM content/influence unless you have 100% written it yourself with no non-textbook/fundamental reference material. (And given time even the books and core references will be tainted in many cases.)
There is no way to tag or otherwise identify a line of code as LLM tainted.
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@voidandcozy @neil Fedora accepts AI assisted contributions so not one that I'm interested in looking at. I also haven't tried it in a very, very long time so I can't really give an opinion on it in terms of user experience
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@skjeggtroll
That's the key difficulty.But in the case of Debian, the main use will be (will, not could) solving dependencies, because that's the key problem facing "developers" (mostly packagers, the unsung heroes of FOSS, really).
@iinavpov @skjeggtroll @neil do I understand it correctly though that Debian now could conceivably allow new packages that are say largely written by an LLM?
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@neil I think "environmental harm" needs to come with some sort of disclaimer.
In the US, yeah, I have no idea how the way they're building datacenters there is legal.
Here in Sweden they run on 100% renewable energy and don't use up water.
I feel the whole environmental debate around LLMs has centered on what happens in the US, with very little actual data shown.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use
@troed @neil Gut feeling / educated guess? Swedish usage is less than 1 % of US usage and US practices are more widely spread in the world due to the sheer monetary pressure and influence.
I'm fairly certain Sweden is the unicorn in this, working enforcement is still quite rare in the rest of the world, even if regulations exist. EU countries are rich and can afford it, most countries focus on primary needs like health and education.
China seems all in for the surveillance value, no limits.
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@troed @neil Gut feeling / educated guess? Swedish usage is less than 1 % of US usage and US practices are more widely spread in the world due to the sheer monetary pressure and influence.
I'm fairly certain Sweden is the unicorn in this, working enforcement is still quite rare in the rest of the world, even if regulations exist. EU countries are rich and can afford it, most countries focus on primary needs like health and education.
China seems all in for the surveillance value, no limits.
"China seems all in for the surveillance value, no limits."
China release their LLMs as open weights, meaning others (like Mistral in France) can run them in their own datacenters.
For some reason (and I have a guess) China is spending a lot of money making sure the world has access to extremely capable Frontier level AI at only the cost of hosting them.
I run such a model myself, on my own GPU in my dev workstation. The energy usage is thus the same as when playing a game.
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@voidandcozy @babe @neil Fedora is owned by fascism and Gen AI loving IBM. Yuck!
