Re: Open vs proprietary LLMs

Pierre-Elliott Bécue <[email protected]> Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:52:56 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Simon Richter <[email protected]> wrote on 25/08/2026 at 05:27:32+0200:

> Hi Wookey,
>
> On 8/25/26 8:49 AM, Wookey wrote:
>
>> Having read the various options and some of the discussion on -vote I
>> am surprised that none of the options we have to vote on seem to
>> distinguish between LLMs where we have all the parts and can run them
>> ourselves, and proprietary LLMs run remotely over which we have no
>> control, reproducibility options, security/privacy insight, etc.
>
> We have the necessary tools in Debian, but ingesting the entirety of
> the Debian source code and mailing list archive, which is all that we
> reasonably have access to in a reproducible way, would not be
> sufficient for anything but a fuzzy code search.
>
> The training set would be too small to argue that copyrights are
> sufficiently diluted that we can ignore licenses (which is a dangerous
> position that we should not adopt), so code generation is out.

Code generation is not out, there is nothing very specific to Debian,
and you can take a strong model and add a RAG layer for Debian specific
data, documentation etc.

I think the reason there is no dedicated ballot options is that the GR
has been open as "Ban LLM contributions", which set the goalpost to LLMs
as a whole.

Also, having the compute resources to run propers models for debian's
purposes is not trivial. But maybe we coul find support with a
hoster/company eager to lend us some machines with GPUs and then it
becomes openrouter+some infra bits.
-- 
PEB

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