Mastodawn

It’s already tempting notably for smallish projects to resort to genAI:
https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/116132543248503962

But I think a race to the bottom has started in #FreeSoftware, with this rationale: if “we” don’t use genAI in our project, then we will lose to the competition, whether free slopware or proprietary.

Ludovic Courtès (@[email protected])

I think these two factors—lack of humanpower and a “big” vision—coupled with the passion for technicalities typical of such projects make them particularly vulnerable to genAI. Because yes, “we” want SMP support in Mach and it’s not been happening until this contributor achieved something with the help of genAI.

Aquilepouet

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Ludovic Courtès Mar 13

… which is short-sighted and loses track of the whole user empowerment goal that free software is supposedly about.

But the “economic” incentives are here.

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Carlos O'Donell Mar 13

@civodul I'm working on a glibc (and jointly a gcc) LLM policy which I'll propose for public review, and the difficulty is in threading the needle between technology that we could use ourselves, and user freedoms. My position ends up being that I want to define a policy that allow the projects the to outright reject *or* accept such changes as they see fit, within certain constraints that support user freedom e.g. either you understand the code or it is reproducible with a tool.

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Siddhesh Poyarekar Mar 13

@codonell @civodul that speaks to the validity of the code, and maybe empowers/includes more people (maybe the opposite too, if LLM use discourages those ideologically opposed?) in the development community for the project. What does it do for the bigger software freedom picture though? What does it do for copyleft code bases? Is the move towards all FOSS code becoming public domain (given that US courts are leaning towards LLM generated code not being copyrightable) a net positive one?

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Ludovic Courtès Mar 13

@siddhesh_p @codonell I think many discussions miss the social aspects of free software: knowledge sharing, mutual aid, building a community around a shared goal. Software for the people, by the people.

And also: Why bother talking to these glibc folks if I can pay 10k–20k to get the machine to produce a C library just for me?

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Carlos O'Donell

@civodul @siddhesh_p I agree there are "isolating" social issues. I am concerned about a new developer who finds it lower personal cost to ask the LLM to write something than to reach out to our community to learn, grow, and expand the FOSS ecosystem. Likewise writing new code with an LLM instead of growing the FOSS ecosystem. I have my doubts that a company can justify having a private C library because of the cost of compliance e.g. security, regulation (EU CRA, FIPS 140-2, SSDLCs) etc.

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Carlos O'Donell Mar 13

@civodul @siddhesh_p My position is that policy won't solve these problems. These problems are foundational. Either you value collective action or you don't. Education is paramount. We retread age old problems.