On 07/08/26 at 17:19 +0200, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote: > Le mardi, 4 août 2026, 18.15:02 h heure d’été d’Europe centrale Lucas > Nussbaum > a écrit : > > > I want a Debian project to which it's _easier_ to participate to, not > > > harder. And I'm afraid that allowing LLM usage will deepen a divide > > > between "those who can afford the price of LLMs" and "those who are stuck > > > with just their aging laptop at hand" (caricature intended). > > > > As I mentioned already in this thread, I've been working on trying to > > get inference providers sponsor access to Debian developers (aligned > > with https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/06/msg00060.html), and I > > recently got some success. So it looks like we should be able to provide > > access to state-of-the-art Open Weight models to Debian contributors. > > Providing easier access to LLMs via paid-for API services to active Debian > contributors is not too dissimilar to sponsoring their LWN subscription, or > an > Office 365 plan, frankly. If the project manages to offer that to its members > who have a use for it (and opt-in), I don't have an issue. But it's still an > "insider" privilege. > > My point is rather: if a large proportion of the work is conducted by active > members with privileged access to efficient paid-for APIs, I worry that we > made contributions by non-members much harder. Let's be real here: it's > already _really hard_ to become an active contributor: there are lots to > learn, lots to read, lots to understand, lots of assumptions and project > history, etc. > > On the other hand, I also agree that it doesn't make too much sense to forbid > those who can afford it to use the powerful tools that exist (externalities > aside, sic).
I agree that it would be a problem if we were completely dependant on super-expensive API services that only some could afford. However: 1/ If Debian get sponsored access to inference services (which looks like it's going to happen), we could choose to extend access to DMs (not just DDs) or even to add a vouching mechanism where a DD/DM could vouch for other contributors to give them access (similar to how we provide salsa accounts). 2/ There are inference services that cost as little as $10 per month for a reasonable volume of usage of Open Weight models (OpenCode Go is an example). 3/ We could also ally with other Free Software projects to build a shared inference infrastructure to serve the Open Weight models that we have today and that are already very interesting. Lucas
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