Responsible use of llms can’t be achieved. Can you verify that all of your training data are square with its creators? If not, how is that responsible?
Can you verify that it didn’t reproduce any code that’s proprietary or has more restrictive licenses than your own?
That’s the main issue for FOSS.
The complement/ reverse is true for companies that produce proprietary software (but they won’t care, sure.)
It can if you control the training data, or if the data is public domain.
But I get your point. You can say all the Diamonds you use are conflict free, but out of the thousands you have, how do you know some have not slipped in.
At what point do you say you did a good enough job, and at what point is it too contaminated?
Like many things, it difficult to draw a line, so its up to communities to set a reasonable standard.
how about making an effort in the first place? to at least make an effort to list all repository thats being used as training data.
Thats a good one. Sounds like a good start for some legislation.
I think the question can be summarized as “do companies have an obligation of mean or an obligation of result in searching for similar code.”
I unless you have a search engine that can search all code across all repository, public or not, it is pretty hard to ask for an obligation of result.
Moreover, in many countries you cannot copyright the code itself, but you can copyright complete algorithm (RSA would be a good example, but not the code implementation itself), or a specific feature (minigames during loading time).
Note that I do not say itis right to do so, I’m all for opensource softwares, but I take into account that some people make a living from their inventions, so I’m generally in favor of limited copyright protection (in terms of both duration and scope).An invention property, a software engineer code, or anything like that, should be shared by both the inventor (for inventing it in the firstplace), and the one financing it (for paying for it), at least until it pays back the money invested.
I have always thought that copyright on code is a bit pointless. Its like copyrighting engineering formulas and calculations. Given a particular problem, there are obvious solutions. The process should not be copyrightable.
I am also anti-copyrighting of features and ideas.
The only thing that should be copyrightable is the result of an technological or human investment, not the process and method for getting there.
That and copyright protection period should be shorter and non renewable.
I think we mostly agree on that.
Idealy feature or idea shouldn’t be copyrightable, but to acheive that we have to find ways to make sure those who work on those new featurea and idea can live decently.
If you work for years on something new, to see it immediately copied by someone who drown your product with cheaper copies, that’d kinda be disheartening for anyone.
What I think would be ideal would be a standard license fee. One cannot prevent other from copying that idea, but one has to pay a reasonable sum to the owner of the idea until the R&D costs are paid (maybe a bit more so it can grow and invest in costlier invention), after which it becomes public domain.
In all cases, credits are to be given to the inventor, a way or another.
Code should’ve never been copyrightable from the start. It’s basically the compute equivalent of a recipe. That aside, almost all modern transformer models are trained on generated data by this point, how would we even apply traditional copyright to that? Whole thing needs tossed and retooled. Entire economic system with it tbh, just slows innovation, and despite what you might believe it doesn’t protect the little guy, it just allows massive corporate conglomerates to buy up everything and control for what will be pretty much the extent of your lifetime.
Code is rather expressive, it’s copyright-able for good reason, you can often tell who wrote what via the style and the way the code was written, and the methods used.
I disagree entirely. I grew up when the conversation around if code should even be copyrightable was happening, and at the time to an extent it made some sense, but the entire copy left movement was intended to combat the copyright of code in the name of open source because copy righting code is both stupid and baseless. Imagine if for loops were copyrighted? That’s what you’re essentially arguing unless there’s some sort of vague subjective measure you’re using to determine when something is copyrightable. The entire thing is just oppressive and does not help the people involved that actually deserve benefit and protection. I’m not saying to cut lose and allow rampant theft but copyright as currently designed and implemented is objectively broken and untooled to the tasks of today, stifling innovation and protecting corporate interests above creators and actual developers.
Copyleft is a form of copyright, if you’re against copyright that’s MIT/BSD 0 clause. Also languages aren’t typically copyrighted, it’s works created within those languages. Although I do agree copyright is kinda very broken, but creators of code do deserve protections, as code is very expressive. I am also a FOSS dev who loves copyleft, which only functions under copyright.
You can’t verify that with humans either. Someone who has seen licensed code, whether proprietary or GPL, will accidentally reproduce snippets of it to accomplish similar tasks in the future.
The problem isnt the fact snippets exist in a codebase. The problem is, the entire fucking website is scraped clean of every codebase that has ever existed without paying a dime to their owner, notifying of their usage, and being transparent of their datasets.
How can it be verifiably responsible if their activity is handwaved under the guise of “business secret”? Its literally people using other peoples work without fair compensation, which means stealing, which means someone has to pay.
The problem isnt the fact snippets exist in a codebase.
No, that IS the problem legally, but it goes slightly beyond snippets, it’s also about having similar overall design.
The problem is, the entire fucking website is scraped clean of every codebase that has ever existed without paying a dime to their owner, notifying of their usage, and being transparent of their datasets.
That is also how humans work. Any code you write is going to be subconsciously influenced by code you’ve seen before, especially code you yourself have written in other projects that you may not legally own. Much like an LLM, the human brain is a black box in that you don’t always know where an idea or something comes from.
This is why clean-room designs are often necessary. You need to replicate something a GPL project does, you should only use devs that have never seen that GPL project’s code. Same for replicating proprietary projects, you don’t use people that have seen that project’s’ code. So again, either the whole issue is stupid and we can use LLMs too, or it’s a real issue and everything should be clean-roomed to avoid any chance of an accidental licensing issue.
Proprietary projects and clean room implementation is often done without having the source code first though, and a clean room implementation assumes its actually clean. meanwhile, most of llms nowadays cant be verifiably do clean room because the source code is probably there too.
When Linus does clean room to make Linux, does he have access to the source code, or does he need to figure out things by himself and only match the interface later on?
I’m sure both of us aren’t good enough to solve this billion dollar problem, but saying its not a problem to steal someone’s work, disregarding their license (even MIT requires attributions!), and releasing their mangled copy as a new product, is dystopian.
The only question I have is why. Genuinely.
Debian exists. It has existed for decades. It works. “Oh but AI makes it faster” so fucking what? We didn’t need “faster” for years whilst it worked fine, it’s not a product on a deadline.
That’s true. Nonetheless the maintainers seem to see AI as a valid way to reduce their workload.
No community distro has the capacity to fork thousands of packages and maintain them. That’s what a true no Ai policy would require. I also have to add that the Linux kernel itself would need to be forked and then maintained. Just the latter point alone is enough to make all this moot.
Completely missing the point.
No this was for Debian only.
In a nutshell, it looks like AI disclosures are encouraged, but not required, and AI usage is encouraged to be human reviewed, but not required. They have also stated they will not allow the use of online AI services for security reasons (but how this will be enforced I’m not sure, since they are relying on the judgement of contributors)
No online services? So you can use AI to generate code, but only garbage local AIs (assuming you don’t have a ton of RAM)?
This seems like the weakest possible decision they could’ve made.
It’s open source software. I’m not saying security isn’t a concern, but this is just stupid.
If you’re not going to ban AI then you should at least take advantage of models that are more reliable and produce higher quality output.
It looks like their point is that they don’t want Debian’s codebase to be used to train corporate AI models, and almost all the proposals seem to agree on that at the very least. I feel like a required AI disclosure would have been better, but what do I know, I’m not a Debian contributor
I am moving to Piefed at scallisto@retrofed.com (https://retrofed.com/u/scallisto)
You are not supposed to use online LLMs for undisclosed security stuff; there is no general ban of online services if you can take responsibility for the stuff it produces for the contributor. At least, this is how I read the general resolution.
This is one more reason, that using Debian as my main distro was a good choice.
Ah my bad, that makes more sense.
I mean the best local models are only a few months behind the the best proprietary cloud models. Just look at Qwen 3.8 Flash or 27B. Imo local models are more than sufficient if you’re going to use AI for programming. Who cares if the small model can’t oneshot the whole patch, you shouldn’t be submitting raw LLM code to public repos anyway. Imo the only acceptable use of LLMs for coding is as a way of rapidly prototyping ideas that you will later mostly/entirely rewrite by hand, or as an extra static analysis tool for finding potential security holes.
And as someone who frankly doesn’t give a shit about intellectual property over code, my main ethical issue with LLMs is the monstrous resource consumption of hyperscale datacenters, so local models are strongly preferable. Also for privacy reasons.
They’re getting better fast
https://www.xda-developers.com/qwen-3-8-27b-reverse-engineering-job-frontier-model/
Still unreliable for tasks which aren’t easy to validate in code, though
At first I was afraid that they would allow for an irresponsible use. But no, they explicitly say “responsible”, so that danger is no more. I’m very much relieved.
Also they explicitly mention that humans will remain accountable. Not Nature, or Fate, or the gods; mark that. Good thinking there!
Problems solved.
This is good news; Debian is still the way to go for me:
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material. The Project does not seek to resolve these unsettled legal questions through this General Resolution, nor does it adopt a position on whether AI-generated output is, in whole or in part, copyrightable or derived from copyrighted works.
They basically pass the buck to the individual developer without taking any responsibility themselves.
Debian acknowledges that the legal status of material produced by generative AI systems remains the subject of ongoing discussion in many jurisdictions, including questions relating to copyright, authorship, licensing, and potential reproduction of training material.
The responsibility for every contribution rests with the contributor who submits it, who remains accountable for its technical quality, legal acceptability, and suitability for inclusion in Debian.
“It may be illegal or against FOSS, but that’s up to you to decide, good luck I guess”
i’m actually a little surprised, given their history about being so hardcore about dfsg compliance.
As long as they don’t allow AI bots to submit changes, this is probably a realistic decision. Assuming that code generated by AI is never going to be copyrighted by the AI companies. In light of this uncertainty I don’t understand why they don’t require AI code to be flagged as such. That bit seems like a really bad idea, legally speaking.
This email from 2016 by jwz springs to mind.
I guess you want Debian to be the kind of operation that uses the work of others while blatantly and explicitly ignoring the wishes of the person who did the actual creative work.
I am increasingly of the opinion that all software developers and adjacent people are fucking scum unless proven otherwise.
as a dev I second this opinion.
I was surprised by how many were Trump supporters.
then I was surprised at how many were anti-vax.
now I’m not even surprised.
Citations on Debian doing any of these?
I am increasingly of the opinion that all software developers and adjacent people are fucking scum unless proven otherwise.
as a dev I second this opinion.
learn to read?
Oh no, the people creating free shit for you to use that’s not monetized in any way, want to reduce their workloads. Scum!
You mean the work that that nobody is forcing them to do? The one they do by their own choice while not asking consent and respecting the wishes of others? Yep those devs sound pretty fucking scummy to me.
boooo
There is no such thing as “responsible use of GenAI”. That said, I understand the decision in the face of even Linus Torvalds allowing AI-generated code into the kernel. If Debian would have banned AI code entirely they would have had to fork every single thing they include in their distro, wipe the AI code from it, and then work to develop it further themselves. It would be too gargantuan a task.
None of the proposals would have banned AI usage in upstream projects, but banning AI usage in the context of the Debian project was on the table
Dammit. Need to find a new OS.
Linus Torvalds has stated a similar policy for the Linux kernel. If you’re really serious about avoiding the power loom, you have to change the kernel too.
If you want to avoid ai assisted code your only chance is to build a new OS with a new kernel yourself.
True. I’m really not happy with the avalanche of dogshit produced by “AI” though. Maybe I need to find a new hobby.
I love Debian. An ol’ rock ballad from the 90s
AI may be the one thing in life I find hard to boycott lmao.
This is like saying “Responsible use of highly infectious diseases.”
Like… In research for vaccines?
Great example. It’s good for that, it must be good universally, so let’s use it for everything. Let’s force people to use it for everything, because it has one legitimate and specific use case scenario.
Yeah, let’s use infectious diseases for socialising with people.
Cough on the face of the person you want to say hello to… Wait… People already do that.