Home | Notifications | New Note | Local | Federated | Search | Logout

Note Detail

Reply to @civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr
Ludovic Courtès@civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr (2026-08-31 05:26:51)
Disregard of legal issues is more of a detail though.

While the text states that “such tools can substantially improve the productivity of contributors” (which is a subject of debate), what’s telling is what the text doesn’t even mention: the “externalities”, the environmental and social impact of these services.
---Reply---
Ludovic Courtès@civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr (2026-08-31 05:27:18)
And that’s probably the crux of the split among free software people on this matter: are our development efforts made in a vacuum?

It’s not new: whether, for instance, to use BitKeeper for Linux development led to similar debates.

The difference here is that LLMs are not even “just a tool” in the sense BK was: the lock-in is going to be much deeper, in our organizations and in our brains.  LLMs threaten the ideal of knowledge sharing and the social fabric we’ve built.

---Replies---

Ludovic Courtès@civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr (2026-08-31 05:28:32)
I’m not a Debian contributor and not a user anymore but I’ve always viewed Debian as a lighthouse for free software and for collective self-determination.

I’m afraid about the signal this vote is sending to the free software community at large; I’m afraid of it moving the Overton window further towards disregard for humans and for the climate change emergency, in a selfish and myopic way that we’ll regret.