I've been spending rather too much of my time reading the depressing threads on LLM use in the kernel. But I thought that this contribution from Lyude Paul worth the investment.

"For many people who need their jobs, guidelines around acceptable use of these tools beyond "a person needs to own the the code" may end up being the only thing allowing employees to be responsible with their contributions without repercussion from employers."

https://lwn.net/ml/all/3a5d891b536588e8e4fc84d60a5c8af72091d852.camel@redhat.com

The Free Software movement never escaped from its origins: the early ‘80s MIT AI Lab. Two things were true in this environment:

• Back when most computers had tens of KiBs of RAM and 1 MiB was a huge amount, programs were simple. Very few programs were so complex that one person could not completely understand them.
• The AI Lab was full of some of the most talented programmers in the world.

This meant that the only obstacles for these people being able to fix bugs and add features to any program were access to the source code and the legal rights to modify it. Once you have those, any program was understandable by that group and they could modify it however they wished.

For the next 40 years, the FSF focused on these two things. The world around them changed. These two prerequisites were never enough for most people (what do 90% of computer users do if you give them even a modest 10,000 line C codebase and tell them they can change it however they like?) and now they aren’t enough even for competent programmers.

When Linus says ‘fork it’ to folks who don’t want LLM-extruded code in their kernel, he knows full well that it is almost impossible to fork a 40 MLoC C (and Rust now) codebase that averages more than one CVE per day and have something useful.

The Free Software movement is struggling now because it obsessed over licenses, which was never a path that would succeed, and ignored the hard problems:

• How do you design environments that enable end users to modify their software?
• How do you engineer software so that it is cheap and easy for a random user to maintain a fork that meets their specific needs?
• How do you foster communities where people want to share improvements, so forks don’t proliferate even when it’s easy?
• How do you create an environment where everyone sees the benefits of user-modifiable code to such a degree that trying to sell anything that doesn’t come with these rights is commercially impossible?

Instead of tackling any of these problems, they created more complex and restrictive GPL variants. And well-paid lawyers found loopholes in them that allowed corporations to keep doing what they wanted (and even pick licenses like AGPLv3 to control ecosystems, because they give the copyright owners so many more rights than everyone else that it’s hard for anyone else to compete). They said ‘don’t worry about the complexity of the licenses, you only need to understand the legal details if you’re creating and distributing derived works’ while completely forgetting that making it possible for anyone to create and distribute modified versions of the programs was the entire point of the Free Software movement.

EDIT: Lots of people are reading this as if it’s about the kernel. I would say that the kernel is the least important part of a system for this. The layers on top, especially anything that directly interfaces with the user or controls their data, are far more important to build around these principles.

The picture a lot of people have of kernel maintainers is a picture of old school kernel maintainers (thankfully inaccurate).

That is of somebody who lacks empathy and soft skills, rudely demands trivia and treats you like a peon.

People like that don't succeed in the kernel these days, and were never worth having anyway - they cause more harm than good + are poison to communities.

Time and time again in my career I've seen it - there is no degree of technical nous that's worth having in exchange for dealing with an arsehole.

Those who remain in the community who behave like that are thankfully a dying breed, and good riddance.

I achieved a personal goal recently: contributing to @lwn which feels like a significant milestone for my writing. I consider LWN to be one of the more prestigious publications out there so I'm really grateful that @jzb took the time to work with me to get there. My article is out of subscriber-only access today, so here it is!

https://lwn.net/Articles/1077739/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116893541666491703

Fellow Californians, get on the phones to Senators Schiff & Padilla & your house rep. Demand they block this horrid ecosystem destroying venture.

Phone numbers for House and Senate offices, both voice and TTY, are available by calling the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 (voice) or 202-224-3091 (TTY)

#CA #nature #conservation

Hey all, I have a big favour to ask.

At the beginning of the week, a large client that we had 100% expected to get started with a large project this month has dropped out at the most inconvenient time for us.

My team at @neighbourhoodie and I are looking for any and all projects we might be able to help with, the sooner the better.

We are really good at turning manual and/or analogue processes into digital ones, especially, but not limited to, if parts of the process need to work while a person or device is offline.

We have proven this repeatedly by making substantial contributions to fighting a Ebola epidemic, testing the first ever Ebola vaccine and distributing the very first COVID vaccinations to all eligible Bavarians.

We are also really good at taking your prototypes and turn them into real-life, secure, reliable, fast and scalable systems that you can bet your company on for years. From UX to SRE, we got you covered.

You need a frontend for a backend service you’ve built, we got you. You need a backend for a mobile app or game you’ve built, we got you.

We also excel at designing, building and debugging distributed database systems of all sizes and shapes. If you sync your photos with tools from the large red brick company, we helped with that.

We can help migrate your infrastructures from US clouds to US hosters (within reason). Wanna move from GitHub to a self-hosted or managed Forgejo? Get in touch!

Additionally, in the past three years we helped 15+ FOSS projects from systemd, to GNOME, to PHP and PyPI, as well as Servo and Log4j with maintenance and security tasks in all sorts of programming languages and environments. We can help with yours, too.

We can also help join your team (remotely, CE[S]T) to augment any current projects you’re need accelerated.

I’m happy to answer any question you might have.

And I appreciate any leads and all boosts <3

https://neighbourhood.ie

Congratulations to all my US friends on making it to the end of your epic 250 year experiment with democracy! May the subsequent imperial phase be mercifully brief and the aftermath painless.

Happy 55th Birthday, Project Gutenberg! Let's celebrate!🎉

Project Gutenberg was founded on July 4, 1971, when Michael Hart typed the U.S. Declaration of Independence into an early internet-connected computer and shared it with friends, making it the first digital text — though its official posting date is recorded as December 1, 1971. (And happy 250th, USA.)

The Declaration of Independence at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1

#ebooks #publicdomain

Only just now realising that the wish fulfilment of having a dedicated slave or polite servant might play a bigger role in the popularity of chatbots than I expected

I can be slow sometimes, but I also always thought the constant signals of servility these systems are made to exude were obviously distasteful, even when experienced second-hand through other people's reports

#wcurl is now two years old!

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/07/03/wcurl-is-here/

Idea: For the next installment in the “Game of Thrones” franchise, base the plot on the endless IETF meltdown about non-hybrid post-quantum cryptography.

The best write-up on the technology issues is, by far, from @sophieschmieg - https://keymaterial.net/2025/11/27/ml-kem-mythbusting/ - since it has a lot of math, I was thinking someone should write a story-oriented narrative, and the GoT scriptwriters have definitely shown the right skillset.

I decided against a link to the mailing-list archive, life is too short.

The @lwn web site is currently under the most intense scraper attack I have seen yet. 1.3M unique IP addresses within the last couple of hours, and it's not done yet. The work we have done on defenses appears to be paying off, though; the server is holding up reasonably well — so far.

...just in case anybody wonders why I have a rather dim view of the whole AI industry...

I am only halfway through this, but I had to stop twice thinking “I need to share this”. It is an enjoyable read, but also one where I pause constantly to think about each morsel.

So I am sharing now:

https://www.the-reframe.com/the-submerged-story/

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tzy4hibtkautrntsz5f3ns37/post/3mpe5kh7ckc23

Okay I've watched my Star Wars as a young sapling and from then on like any healthy young lass, but wow this fucking thread elevated the whole thing for me:
https://blondejaneblonde.tumblr.com/post/656895555488874496/fandomrecycling-jumpingjacktrash-kyraneko

Into the hall of fame of Tumblr posts it goes! 😹

#StarWars

RE: https://fediscience.org/@petergleick/116805875893611216

Yes, today IS the day to talk about #climate change and it's growing impacts. And tomorrow is the day to talk about #climatechange, as is the day after and every day after that.
Silence is a disservice to humanity.

RE: https://mendeddrum.org/@terrybot/116802847296433056

Pterry predicted mechanical keyboard enthusiasts.

Maybe also Emacs users.

EU needs to make a stand on Play Integrity. If app devs enforce Play Integrity, this means only Google Certified devices can use banking, etc. This excludes all alternative mobile OS. No #postmarketOS, no #SailfishOS, no Android derivatives #GrapheneOS etc. You don't need Play Integrity. If someone is capable to install or use alternative OS, they sure know what to install or not install, it is on their responsibility. Using non-root but bootloader unlocked device (otherwise can't use alternative OS) does not make my device less secure. On the contrary, it is using an up to date OS with the latest security patches. Do we really want all mobile devices have to be Google Certified? No. #mobile #integrity #bootloader #unlocked #nonsense #Europe

"But what if it's good? You can't ban AI submissions completely because what if some of them are good?"

Respectfully, I think a number of AI fans have lost the plot with that argument.

For some people, the point of banning AI submissions is that there's been a deluge of slop submissions. The fact that AI bug reports or whatever are improving *may* turn them around on allowing them at some point. But, you know, let them come around on it on their own, mmmkay?

For many others, though, the point is that they don't want AI submissions, period, end of story. The quality could be excellent, but it does not matter. The point is that it's from an LLM and they object to that on principle. Whether one agrees with that or not, respect it, ok?

It's like arguing with a person who's a vegetarian or vegan, "But this tastes excellent! And the chicken was free-range and well-cared for right up until the moment it was killed. Didn't even see it coming. Joe Pecky thought he was going to a party, and then he got a quick one in the back of the head."

It's still chicken. And some people don't eat animals. Respect that, too.

I'm not going to lecture other people on their use of LLMs, etc., here. But please, stop lobbying everybody else to just give up and accept it, especially in open source.

The thing that makes open source special, when it is, is the human factor. It's building a community that cares about a project. Talking to other humans and working with them on problems. It's OK if that moves more slowly. What's the damn rush anyway?

Sure, the project itself is important, but so is the surrounding community. When that just becomes a bunch of prompt fondling and button pressing to unleash whatever the LLM spat out into a CI/CD pipeline to make its way into another CI/CD pipeline... what even is the point?

#LLMs #OpenSource

An offer of "free" LLM use made to developers in the GCC and glibc communities, which are full of developers who feel strongly about free software, was never going to be received with universal acclaim...

https://lwn.net/ml/all/aac20a98-a70e-4268-a758-316ac0407a16@redhat.com

It will be an interesting day when, after the inevitable rugpull happens, these tools cease being available for use without charge. Hopefully we will still remember how to write and review code.

Remember the #Hercules monochrome ISA graphics adapter?

I had one in the first PC I used – about ~37 years ago.

The driver for it was now removed from #Linux for Version 7.2: https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/37a91b995952a556a6eb90c31736ee773b86999c

#LinuxKernel #Linux