Hi all,
13 days ago, I reworded Ludo’s proposal taking into account many
comments. My aim was twofold: (1) keep unity beyond our diversity,
still keeping my understanding of the “origin spirit“ and (2) focus on
our shared understanding of our principles and values, i.e., articulate
the pledge itself.
My draft is on-line easing the reading:
https://simon.tournier.info/posts/2026-05-28-guix-genai.html) for
I hope this drafty proposal will help for a better mutual understanding
toward some regulation stance.
Last, what seems missing, IMHO, it's an item about `Assisted-by` and a
clause of conscience.
Cheers,
simon
- - -
```org
* Summary
Guix is a free software project; it is made by people for people, with
knowledge sharing and empowerment as some of its core values. This document
proposes a clear stance and a policy to support this vision.
* Motivation
Free software as a project is fundamentally about humans: it is about
producing software that guarantees the freedom of its users, and in particular
freedom from the original developers; it is about empowering people,
increasing their autonomy, by providing them the means to study and adapt the
software to their needs; it is about knowledge sharing and mutual aid.
Guix as free software contributes to an ecosystem of digital commons that
embodies decades of human creative effort and that is now used as raw material
for stochastic text generators—large language models (LLMs), also referred to
as “generative artificial intelligence” or “genAI”—primarily backed by large
corporations.
However impressive the automation allowed by genAI in assisting with software
development tasks may look, our community believes genAI has an impact that
undermines the very foundations of free software and Guix.
The legal and ethical framework governing genAI is complex and rapidly
evolving. On the legal side, while copyright law traditionally permits
reading by humans, the large-scale extraction of knowledge from code for
genAI training enters uncharted territory. This uncertainty is further
intensified by ongoing legislative discussions, such as
[[https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/774095/IUST_STU(2025)774095_EN.pdf][European
Union]],
[[https://copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf][US
Copyright Office]] and
[[https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/03.20.26-National-Policy-Framework-for-Artificial-Intelligence-Legislative-Recommendations.pdf][White
House]], reflecting the regulators’ struggle to keep pace with
scientific and technological advancement. On the ethical side, the
definition of what “open source AI [model]” means is very
[[https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition][fresh]], and
concrete operational implementations are still at early stages.
Still on the ethical side, many in our community share their concerns
about breaching the reciprocity baked into copyleft licenses, already
happening with [[https://lwn.net/Articles/1061534][=chardet=]]
LLM-assisted “rewrite”, or
[[https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/][EmDash WordPress
reimplementation]] in TypeScript “under the more permissive MIT
license”. Also many in our community share their concerns about fair
sharing of natural resources and the habitability of the planet: the
ecological footprint of genAI is well documented, going from the
[[https://cleanview.co/content/power-strategies-report][energy]],
[[https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/][water,
and materials needed to build the servers used to train models and to
service requests]] to the land usage of those data center, and to the
energy and
[[https://theconversation.com/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much-262901][water
needed to operate those data centers]].
As we strive to preserve this ecosystem of free software for future
generations, this document proposes the adoption of a pledge in support of
human production by people for people.
* Detailed Design
We propose the adoption of a pledge on behalf of the project, with the
following goals:
- Contributing to the public debate on these matters and creating ties
with like-minded organizations and grassroots movements.
- Strengthening support for craftspeople the project interacts
with—translators, artists, developers, and so on.
- Questioning the reasons that make genAI feel necessary for people
using Guix, and finding ways to fill the gap.
This pledge is /not/ about claiming a “moral superiority” of the project and
its members for not resorting to genAI, nor is it about “virtue signaling”.
We are well aware that commercial genAI services perform well on tasks
relevant to Guix, first and foremost packaging. There is no doubt that genAI
is already being used within the community. Our goal is not to judge what
individuals are doing, nor not to point fingers at individuals. Instead, this
proposal aims at setting a standard for what we do collectively within the
project.
** Pledge
We propose the following project commitments:
1. The project (defined as maintainers, team members, and anyone with write
access to a Guix repository, including Weblate, or to Guix resources such
as the build farm) *will not use or encourage use of genAI*. Namely, the
use of genAI means *not simply pasting* answers, code or packages, code
reviews, artwork, translations or comments generated by genAI *without
proper review using human own input*.
2. We kindly ask contributors to respect this choice and apply it equally. We
ask to all contributors to *never use genAI for directly or automatically
interacting with the project*.
3. The project may incorporate contributions assisted by genAI as long
as they are *not
[[https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Legally-Significant.html][“legally
significant”]]* to ensure the contributor has a valid copyright claim
on the code. As a rule of thumb, this includes code less than
15-line-long, or package definitions that are evidently not creative,
similar to those that =guix import= and similar tools might produce.
4. The project kindly asks to *not propose contributions assisted by genAI
outside packages*. Namely contributions assisted by genAI may be accepted
only on the =gnu/packages= sub-hierarchy.
5. Software where most of the code was authored or co-authored by genAI **will
not be packaged in Guix**. Notable examples of such code include
[[https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/][Claude’s
C compiler]], [[https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash][EmDash]], and
[[https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs][Neomacs]].
6. The project will keep working to **provide people of all levels of
experience with the resources to use Guix and to contribute to Guix**
without feeling the need to resort to genAI:
- by facilitating access to documentation and improving it to
better suit the needs to people with different levels of
experience—newcomers discovering free software, people with prior
exposure to GNU/Linux, developers;
- by developing and improving tools that make it easier to get started such
as [[https://guix-hpc.gitlabpages.inria.fr/guix-packager/][Guix Packager]]
and =guix import=;
- by improving diagnostics to make our tools more approachable;
- by providing communication channels anyone can use to look for
help or to offer support, where all and everyone can feel safe to
participate;
- by improving tools for mechanical translation, refactoring, and
updates such as =guix import=, =guix style=, and =guix refresh=,
so that tedious packaging tasks can be automated in a way that is
transparent, deterministic, and maintains the project’s
sovereignty.
7. We acknowledge that the project’s sustainability depends on automation for
all the mechanical, labor-intensive tasks such as package updates. We will
keep **improving hackable tools and services to automate some of the
package collection maintenance work**.
** Publication
The Guix project will publicize this pledge, by referring to it in its
contribution guidelines, by making it easy to find, by presenting it in blog
posts, and through any other communication deemed appropriate.
** Related Work
A number of free software projects have adopted a policy with respect to
genAI, revealing different sensibilities and choices. Here are some of
those we looked at:
+ Asahi Linux
+ https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
+ Debian
+ https://lwn.net/Articles/1020968/ (May 2025)
+ https://lwn.net/Articles/1061544/ (March 2026)
+ FreeBSD
+ https://www.freebsd.org/status/report+2025+04+2025+06/
+ Gentoo
+ https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
+ GNOME (individual packages)
+ https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome+calendar/+/merge_requests/725
+
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/loupe+no+longer+allows+generative+ai+contributions/27327
+
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/+/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#use+of+generative+ai
+ GNU Binutils
+ https://sourceware.org/binutils/wiki/LLM_Generated_Content
+ GNU Gnulib
+ https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug+gnulib/2026+02/msg00064.html
+ Linux
+
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/process/generated-content.rst
+ https://lwn.net/Articles/1032612/
+ https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding+assistants.html
+ LLVM
+ https://github.com/llvm/llvm+project/blob/main/llvm/docs/AIToolPolicy.md
+ Mastodon
+ https://github.com/mastodon/.github/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md
+ NetBSD
+ https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit+guidelines.html
+ Pepper & Carrot (comics)
+
https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/documentation/409_Code_of_Conduct.html#use+of+generative+ai
+ Servo
+
https://web.archive.org/web/20260311122512/https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting+started.html#ai+contributions
+ Zig
+ https://ziglang.org/code+of+conduct/#strict+no+llm+no+ai+policy
Software package lists:
- "No AI" list
+ https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html
- software projects that accept LLM contributions
+ https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware
** Cost of Reverting
Should consensus be found /via/ a new GCD, the pledge could be removed or
amended.
* Drawbacks and Open Issues
This proposal takes a clear stance that not everyone may agree with.
This could lead to fragmentation within the Guix community, or within
the free software community.
```
