Re: Third update of the ballot option: Call the Free Software community to develop Free AI.

Steve McIntyre <[email protected]> Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:13:55 +0100

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

Hey folks,

On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 05:57:31PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
>
>I think it's hard that many people will oppose your initiative. I mean, who
>would say “lets not build an ethically sourced, resource efficient,
>state-of-the-art LLM model that works better than the currently existing
>proprietary options, and run it on community-hosted, not-for-profit, for
>every interested user ever”? Yes, of course it is quite removed from
>reality as of today, but so were a free Unix system, a pleasant and
>integrated desktop environment, and many other things we now take for
>granted...
>
>But having this proposal as an option to (or as a concurrent vote to) a
>Debian policy on LLM-assisted (or LLM-generated) works seems a bit
>misguided. After all, “we call to the Free Software community” is not “I am
>starting a project and will devote 20 hours a week towards this goal” (and
>of course, I'm not expecting you to.
>
>Would it be nice to have the perfect LLM, ethics-wise? Of course it
>would. But just stating “it would be nice” is not prone to have much of an
>effect.

Nod. This initiative is almost entirely orthogonal to the questions
that are being raised by other proposals, which IMHO makes it a bad
fit here.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                [email protected]
"Managing a volunteer open source project is a lot like herding
 kittens, except the kittens randomly appear and disappear because they
 have day jobs." -- Matt Mackall

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