Debian polls developers: ban AI bots, tame them, or let them loose?
Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?
The Debian project is running a complex General Resolution on LLM usage, with eight proposals ranging from a total ban to conditional acceptance. The vote, extended by an extra week, has drawn fewer than 350 ballots so far. The Register breaks down each proposal, notes the challenges of reaching a 3:1 majority, and compares Debian's stance with other distros like Gentoo, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem (planet Earth) and that is a deal-breaker.
- jnwatson
Kind of arbitrary since it doesn't impact their upstreams.
The very first thing I used GenAI for was fixing build and CI pipeline issues, exactly the drudgery no one cares about. Today, LLMs are excellent at the yeoman's work of maintaining patches across multiple versions and upstream, which is what I imagine a lot of Debian devs do.
Why you wouldn't want to hand that off to a computer program is beyond me.
- ragebol
> If Proposal H has a weakness, it's that it does not distinguish between local and cloud-based LLMs
Is the energy usage so different between local and cloud inference? Both require electricity, the local option even more than the better optimized cloud variant even perhaps.
How either is powered makes the crucial difference I suppose. Both can potentially run on solar as well as gas or nuclear.
It's the training that takes the most energy, and that needs to happen for locally running or cloud models regardless.
What am I missing here?
EDIT:
Proposal H mentions "LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem"
I was thinking solely about energy usage, but there is of course also water usage.
A local setup is not water-evaporator cooled most likely.
- ivandenysov
> Debian is a large and complicated project: the release announcement for version 13 says it has 69,830 packages, which take a total of 403 GB of disk, and contain 1,463,291,186 lines of code. So, suitably, it is a large and complex poll.
Surely these are not just Debian-owned packages. Whatever Debian decides won’t apply to packages not owned by Debian
- lproven
Posting this because I want people to vote -- and ideally vote for a total ban.
- nekusar
I do use and run my own LLMs locally. But I understand why Debian might ban it, under just 1 reason:
LLM outputs cannot be copyrighted.
That alone starts to invalidate the GPL and other FLOSS licenses. It overall weakens the project the more you accept. And companies (MS, Amazon, etm) will gleefully loot anything marked with "LLM" as a free-for-all.
Until the whole copyright situation can be finalized, I'd understand for any FLOSS org to refuse all LLM code.
(Its also the same reason why Oracle also forbids all LLM code in Java and their DB. Same reason.)