On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 01:21:45PM +0100, Andrea Pappacoda wrote: > > I believe the technology matters a lot. In fact, it seems to me that people > complaining about the use of "AI" do not do so for the fact that being > assisted by some kind of tool is bad (which is a different topic), but for > the consequences that the creation of the technology itself has on free > software, society, and the environment.
I don't believe technology matters with respect to Lucas's original proposal. That's why replacing "AI" with "tool-assisted" was fairly straightforward. And so if we were to go ahead with a GR, I'd have no problem with either the original Proposal A or a revision that talked about "tool-assisted contributions"[1]. [1] https://salsa.debian.org/lucas/ai-gr/-/commit/c4b9a71247047f762aa But as you say, for some people the arguments they make against the use of "AI" (whatever the hell that means) is about the consequences, either real or imagined or projected, that they think the technology will have. And the problem here is that it's still early days, and some of the initial estimates about (for example) water usage of AI queries seem to have been half-baked, or at least, highly disputed. For example, instead of a 16 ounce of bottled water, there are other estimates that put it at 45 mililiters, or even 0.26 milliliters. One of the reasons behind the wide disparity is about how to account for the cost of training the LLM. That's a one-time cost, and as the number of queries go up, that cost will get amortized and go down significantly. It's also the case that if you believe that the LLM is going to be trained *anyway*, the water savings of foregoing the use of the LLM for code reviews, or cherry-picking of a patch, or even vibe-coding is probably going to be in the mililiter range as opposed to the entire bottle of water range. I think people also tend to under-estimate how much water gets used when creating their pair of jeans (estimates range from 4,000 liters to 10,000 liters), or how much water they use when taking their daily showers, or how much CO2 they produce when travelling to conferences or visiting their families. (OMG! An Open Source maintainer is travelling all over the world to go to conferences! Let's ban the use of their software in Debian!! *That* will solve the global warming crisis....) I have a feeling a lot of people arguing for a GR about "AI" want something far more hard-core anti-AI use than Lucas's "Proposal A". And if they don't get what they want, are they going to leave Debian? I don't know. But I also know that what Debian might choose to do is highly unlikely to change what certain Open Source projects, such as the Linux Kernel, have already chosen as their policy. And so a claim that all AI generated tool is highly problematic with respect to copyright, and so must be excluded from Debian, (a) doesn't meet up with the legal advice that some of us have gotten from other contexts, such as from the Linux Foundation, which *does* have lawyers on staff, and (b) will very likely result in Debian being made irrelevant. Cheers, - Ted
