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GNOME and KDE have started to consider LLM policies, and we should talk about what this is really about.
KDE caught everyone's attention first by igniting a flame war with an LLM-friendly draft that ended up being deleted, causing a few bans, and having a bunch of people go full "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make". GNOME has not proposed anything official, but some teams (gnome-calendar, loupe, libadwaita, gnome-software, Circle, among others) already have strong policies in place, and there is now an informal draft to ban all LLM contributions to GNOME projects and infrastructure.
However I believe these discussions are not about nitpicking workflows but rather about the raison d'être, the reason to be, of FLOSS projects.
Communities Or CompletionismMy take is that there are currently two ways of thinking about why FLOSS exists, or should exist. So far, both sides have coexisted but the growing acceptance of LLMs into some developer workflows has disrupted the balance.
We can call one of these sides "collectivism". This frames FLOSS to be about accomplishing things together, enjoying the journey and bonds that big goals tend to create. The fun is the collective effort and challenge. Overcoming language and social barriers is part of the reward. "The journey is the destination", "FLOSS is the friends we made along the way", etc.
On the other side there is "completionism", where FLOSS is "just a product" and its only goal is to always be better, faster, safer. Any fun to be had is in individually solving technical problems and requirements. Social bonds may happen, but colleagues are more coworkers than community. This is a "100% allglitches alltricks" TAS speedrun. The "we are apolitical", "we only care about the code" view.
My assessment is that the collectivist framing finds FLOSS primarily a social exercise that rewards you with experiences, bonds, and ideas outside of your niche interests. Some times you even get good software as a bonus! The second framing sees FLOSS as a tool to scale the complexity of your individual computer interest, like graphics or security. FLOSS is a convenience compared to manually rebasing patches and forks all the time.
The problem we are facing is that LLMs have given the second group a lever to stop giving the collectivist framing any room. When the LLM can get you 80% of the way to your goal, there is no need to "waste" time in mentoring, discussion, or convincing others. The temptation compounds if you are considered an expert in your field. You can surely fill in the last 20%, right? Is anyone going to challenge not only the machine, but also the expert?
Progress At All CostsSince LLMs present themselves as neutral, and dispassionate, opposition to their output becomes opposition to objective progress: bug fixes, security hypotheticals, features. Progress is whatever the LLM, under my own careful eyes, says it is. Interactions with others become formalities, since the LLM is simply boosting my own, already expert and close to infallible, output. Right?
Unfortunately this "expert slop", where expert is a self-perceived title, carries a corporate framing that damages interactions. Others become, at best, fungible coworkers, and, at worst, annoying speed bumps in the race to 100% completion of any software interest the expert has. No more mentoring, debating, flame wars. "Progress" is the only goal. The line must go up.
There is more to say about how this machiavellian framing causes far more important harms and externalities, in the name of LLMs themselves, or apparent LLM-assisted progress. Think of any group and you will find out they have been handed part of the bill for these externalities:
These are the real costs in the "Progress At All Costs" that LLMs bring into FLOSS. These are the people who will pay the bill, behind the scenes and far from our screens, so that some big brain engineers can avoid reading documentation, writing boilerplate, learning unfamiliar code, or, worse, working with others.
FLOSS As Principled SoftwareAlmost ten years ago Allan Day described GNOME as Principled Software because of its commitment to always doing the right thing, in code or design, because it was the right thing and not because of ease, pressure, or hype. I believe this is why so many other FLOSS projects have always looked at GNOME for guidance on what good FLOSS should be. This discussion is just another opportunity to continue to meet this expectation.
Recent discussions have shared similar sentiments like reminding us that we do book clubs because we want to read and enjoy books, not to just discuss over summaries because it is "more productive". That when pressed to accelerate FLOSS, to make the line go up, we have to ask for whom do we want to be more productive, efficient, faster?. And that every decision is political and affect other people around you.
We already know that LLM productivity is not real, just a self perception, that LLMs are just a fairy tale to maintain tech stocks hypergrowth, by farming engineers for engagement, and the latest in a series of attacks to commoditize tech workers. Knowing all this, are we still going to play along with big tech's lies and exploitation? Or, are we going to make another principled stand?
GNOME did not need LLMs to produce 30 years of creative engineering, design, localization, inclusion, and collaboration that has been shared with people around the world. It does not need to throw away this incredible legacy simply because LLMs happen to farm our worst individualist impulses.
We came this far without compromising our principles, let's not start now.
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Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme, which is visible on the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper. Debian plans to release Trixie, the next release, next year. As ever, we need your help in creating its theme! You have the opportunity to design a theme that will inspire thousands of people while working in their Debian systems.
For the most up to date details, please refer to the wiki.
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Juliette Taka Belin for doing the Emerald theme for bookworm.
The deadlines for submissions is: 2024-09-19
The artwork is usually picked based on which themes look the most:
If you'd like more information or details, please post to the Debian Desktop mailing list.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Congratulations!
Hi,
Keeping my promise for monthly bits, here's a quick snapshot of my first ten days as DPL.
Special thanks to Jonathan for an insightful introduction that left less room for questions. His introduction covered my first tasks like expense approval and CTTE member appointments thoroughly. Although I made a visible oversight by forgetting to exclude Simon McVittie <smcv> from the list, whose term has ended , I'm committed to learning from this mistake. In future I'll prioritize thorough proofreading to ensure accuracy.
Part of my "work" was learning what channels I need to subscribe and adjust my .procmailrc and .muttrc took some time.
Recently I had my first press interview. I had to answer a couple of prepared questions for Business IT News. It seems journalists are always on the lookout for unique angles. When asked if humility is a new trait for DPLs, my response would be a resounding "No." In my experience, humility is a common quality among DPLs I've encountered, including Jonathan.
One of my top priorities is reaching out to all our dedicated and appointed teams, including those managing critical infrastructure. I've begun with the CTTE, Salsa Admins and Debian Snapshot. Everything appears to be in order with the CTTE team. I'm waiting for response from Salsa and Snapshot, which is fine given the recent contact.
I was pointed out to the fact that lintian is in an unfortunate state as Axel Beckert confirmed on the lintian maintainers list. It turns out that bug #1069745 of magics-python should not have been undetected for a long time if lintian bug #677078 would have been fixed. It seems obvious to me that lintian needs more work to fulfill its role as reliably policy checker to ensure our high level of packaging quality.
In any case thanks a lot to Axel who is doing his best but it seems urgent to me to find some more person-power for this task. Any volunteer to lend some helping hand in the lintian maintainers team?
On 2024-04-30 I gave my first talk "Bits from greenhorn DPL" online at MiniDebConf Brasil in Belo Horizonte. The Q&A afterwards stired some flavours of the question: "What can Debian Brasil do better?" My answer was always in a way: Given your great activity in now organising the fifth MiniDebConf you are doing pretty well and I have no additional hints for the moment.
Kind regards Andreas.
We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected seven contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.
Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.
Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian
Deliverables of the project: Make the entire Android toolchain, Android Target Platform Framework, and SDK tools available in the Debian archives.
Project: Benchmarking Parallel Performance of Numerical MPI Packages
Deliverables of the project: Deliver an automated method for Debian maintainers to test selected numerical Debian packages for their parallel performance in clusters, in particular to catch performance regressions from updates, and to verify expected performance gains, such as Amdahl’s and Gufstafson’s law, from increased cluster resources.
Project: Debian MobCom
Deliverables of the project: Update the outdated mobile packages and recreate aged packages due to new dependencies. Bring in more mobile communication tools by adding about 5 new packages.
Project: Improve support of the Rust coreutils in Debian
Deliverables of the project: Make uutils behave more like GNU’s coreutils by improving compatibility with GNU coreutils test suit.
Project: Improve support of the Rust findutils in Debian
Deliverables of the project: A safer and more performant implementation of the GNU suite's xargs, find, locate and updatedb tools in rust.
Project: Expanding ROCm support within Debian and derivatives
Deliverables of the project: Building, packaging, and uploading missing ROCm software into Debian repositories, starting with simple tools and progressing to high-level applications like PyTorch, with the final deliverables comprising a series of ROCm packages meeting community quality assurance standards.
Project: procps: Development of System Monitoring, Statistics and Information Tools in Rust
Deliverables of the project: Improve the usability of the entire Rust-based implementation of the procps utility on Linux.
Congratulations and welcome to all the contributors!
The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor contributors and outreach tasks.
Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the contributors' weekly reports on the [debian-outreach mailing-list][debian-outreach-ml], chat with us on our [IRC channel][debian-outreach-irc] or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.
[debian-outreach-ml]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-outreach/ (debian-outreach AT lists.debian.org) [debian-outreach-irc]: irc://irc.debian.org/debian-outreach (#debian-outreach on irc.debian.org)
We are pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to sponsor DebConf24 as a Platinum Sponsor.
Infomaniak is an independent cloud service provider recognised throughout Europe for its commitment to privacy, the local economy and the environment. Recording growth of 18% in 2023, the company is developing a suite of online collaborative tools and cloud hosting, streaming, marketing and events solutions.
Infomaniak uses exclusively renewable energy, builds its own data centers and develops its solutions in Switzerland at the heart of Europe, without relocating. The company powers the website of the Belgian radio and TV service (RTBF) and provides streaming for more than 3,000 TV and radio stations in Europe.
With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Infomaniak is contributing to the Debian annual Developers' conference, directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software. Infomaniak contributes to strengthen the community that collaborates on Debian projects from all around the world throughout all of the year.
Thank you very much, Infomaniak, for your support of DebConf24!
Become a sponsor too!DebConf24 will take place from 28th July to 4th August 2024 in Busan, South Korea, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 21st to 27th July 2024.
DebConf24 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations should contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, or viisit the DebConf24 website at https://debconf24.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/.