I am probably the most AI-using person on this list, see https://awohl.com for projects.
Most of the projects I have worked on are for the Z80. If the proposed FreeDos AI rules were applied to those, there are some policy gaps you might want to address. The following are projects that, if applied to FreeDos, might cause problems for those not open to AI: - https://github.com/avwohl/mpm2 A MP/M 2 running in an emulator with SSH and SFTP/SCP support. Allows easy development in a cloud environment. Used by the Z80 ADA compiler to upload multitasking tests and run them. - Programs in the Apple, Windows, and Android stores providing a Z80 emulator running https://github.com/wwarthen/RomWBW https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nzn870x9p6z https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.awohl.cpmdroid If a FreeDOS Amazon AWS AMI appeared that let you ssh/sftp/rcp into a FreeDOS system, would that be a problem? How about FreeDOS in the Apple, Windows, and Android stores? Maybe it's more of a trademark, and can AI use the trademark issue? ----- Original message ----- From: Jim Hall via Freedos-devel <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: Jim Hall <[email protected]> Subject: [Freedos-devel] AI policy proposal Date: Sunday, May 24, 2026 6:30 PM Hi everyone Like many of you, I'm concerned about AI creeping into open source projects. I've added a few other issues at the end [1] that expand on this. So there are reasons not to allow AI in the core parts of FreeDOS. I thought I'd try to capture the consensus of the email list into an AI policy that I can post on the website. I've tried to keep this high level. I think this matches the conversations we've had here, whenever AI has come up: *Scope: Any package that gets installed as part of a “plain DOS” installation. * *Packages in Games or Devel or Edit or Util (out others) are not “core” to FreeDOS. I'm less sensitive to stuff in the other package groups. But I'm being careful with my wording here. It's not just Base, but any program that gets included in a “plain DOS” install. That's where I draw a solid line. * *Code: Do not allow AI for code generation. * *It's ok to use AI to summarize a contribution (like analyze a PR), or to use AI to help identify bugs. But the code must be 100% written by a human. Again, this is only for programs in a “plain DOS” install. If you want to use AI to “vibe code” a game, or a new text editor or word processor, or something else, that's up to you. * *Documentation: Not sure where to draw the line. * *I don't want to read AI-generated bs, I have to do that as part of my day job (university) and I don't like it. But I know not everyone is comfortable with writing docs. You might not be good at grammar or spelling, or even the writing process itself. Some might prefer to use AI “assisted” tools like Grammarly that can rewrite sections of text to meet a target, or Scribe that can “watch” what you do and write a how-to for you. For me, I prefer to read human-written stuff-- but does it really “break” a program if AI helped write the docs? In the end, it should be arguably “written by a human” but “AI assisted” for docs is ok for me. If it's your docs, you “own” what's there. If it's wrong, you need to fix it. If something is plagiarized, you need to take it out. Or should we not allow AI-written docs at all, for programs in a “plain DOS” install? * *Translation: AI can be used for translating spoken languages. * *This has been done for years (and not really “AI” but “maching learning”**) such as Google Translate. While “machine” translation isn't perfect, it can usually be “good enough” until someone can provide a human-generated translation. Note that quality can vary when translating to/from different languages. For example, I find translations from Spanish to English, or French to English, are usually quite good. Translations from German to English, or Russian to English, can be pretty rough. This isn't “translating between programming languages.” See ‘Code’ above. * Did I miss anything? __ [1] I'm sure AI is a neat tool for some, but using AI in an open source project can turn off a lot of contributors. For myself, I work on open source projects because it's fun, and AI is not “fun” for me. There's also a very strong legal reason; US courts find that AI generated content is not eligible for copyright protection. I've also seen examples where AI “vibe coding” regurgitated some of my code. That was a personal experiment for a “niche” topic where I asked copilot to write a version of nroff; the AI cited an article I wrote in its summary about “here's how this works” and I recognized my own code in the generated output. This is dangerous because in the online article it pulled from, I wrote about how this isn't a safe way to write this (doesn't catch edge cases, etc) but it was an easy way to show it to non-programmers. But copilot didn't add that caveat to the code it generated for me. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
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