Le Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 04:07:04PM +0100, Ian Jackson a écrit :
Hi. Thanks for engaging in this discussion. Your proposal is interesting and I think we're less far away ideologically than it might appear.
Hi Ian, thanks for your message. My main worry with this GR is that it would divide Debian and I am glad that our discussion happens.
The reason I think we need a GR on this specific topic is: so many people have dxifferent interpretations of what these existing rules mean.
Votes are not a process to build concensus. They are a process to stop conflicts at the cost of taking the risk of breaking a society. I worry that in the context of this GR, the risk is too high. I am not satisfied with any ballot at the moment. They either take too much away from me, or they do not give me anything new except for a set of rules that will be hard to change, difficult to enforce and can become toxic in the future (for instance being used to harrass one developer). I am deeply disturbed by the LLM race today, for its total disrespect to authors, its hypocrisy regarding copyright violation, its harassment of non-commercial hosted communities which soon or later will not be able to afford the bandwith and admin cost of being scanned millions of times a day, its connection with a clique of billionaires promoting fascist parties in elections taking place in Germany, France and other countries, for its unreasonable use of non-renewable energies, and many more things. On the other hand, LLMs are changing my life, empowering me to finally start to develop my written communicatons skills in the language of the country that has accepted me as a mostly illiterate foreigner for more than 20 years, allowing me to revive my Perl skills after a pause of more than a decade, and renewing my love for this language, and many other things. I believe that the Free Software community can give that to everyone on Earth, in a respectful and sustainable way.
I think this proposition of yours is a consequence of the DFSG.
In some sense everything is a consequence of the DFSG since this is the beacon that brought us here. And this is why I propose to look at what can unite us in the future regarding LLMs instead of going selecting balllots that will leave too many of us dissatisfied.
Or to put it another way: what do you think is the status within Debian of the output from "bad LLMs" (the ones that are unethical, according to your principles) ?
Bad actors using bad LLMs have broken a lot of things, including things that were already falling apart such as Internet search, and as of today it is way easier, and perhaps less polluting (consider the pollution from video advertisements on regular websites), to search for technical information through a text discussion with a commercial LLM provider. We are back to the start: building a Free system by evading from a proprietary system. On my side, I do not have objections on using bad LLMs to push the development of really Free LLMs forward. I would like to reach a point where we can agree to disagree without having one side imposing its own terms on the other side. Have a nice day, Charles -- Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from work, https://fediscience.org/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
