Hello Charles, Charles Plessy dijo [Wed, Jul 29, 2026 at 07:06:08AM +0900]:
Hi Russ,thank you for your comments. Yes, it is exactly my intent to provide a "do nothing" option, which I explained in my previous emails, so you are totally right about the "failure to be explicit" given the feedback that I had. I originally thouhgt it is better to have a ballot as lean as possible, but you are correct. Here is a revised version. ---- Draft ballot: Call the Free Software community to write Free AI ---- We are concerned that using the General Resolution process to establish rules and red lines on the use of generative AI in Debian will only result in increasing the total number of demotivated or quitting developers. We explicitely decide to not enforce new hard rules on that topic, and instead issue the following non-binding statement, that reflects our opinion that we can make a better future if we put enough energy in the right direction. (...) It has been said by some that this is impossible; we believe it to be wrong. We call to the Free Software community to write such AI models that follow our core values and can be integrated in our operating system to empower our users to uses of this technology while respecting Free Software, privacy, diversity and environment. ---- End draft ballot ----
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. — Gunnar.
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
