Over the past few months, I have found myself under the spotlight on kernel mailing lists. What started as targeted discussions quickly turned into advocating for the kernel community to respect the mostly silent crowd of developers and maintainers who do not want to fully embrace AI usage. It appears this didn't go unnoticed, as shown by Jon Corbet's talk at Kernel Recipes. (1/5)

#Linux #kernel #AI

Despite having a thick skin, the whole experience felt very lonely. I received less support than I would have hoped for. What surprised me the most, though, was something else. Multiple people contacted me privately. They didn't just express their support, but also told they didn't dare speaking out in public. This included at least one kernel maintainer. I can't help feeling this is a sign that something is going wrong in the kernel community or the industry at large. Or probably both. (2/5)

With my "How we can resist generative AI" BoF proposal for OSS Europe rejected, I've been thinking about other ways to give a voice to the underrepresented part of the community. There will be plenty of hallway space in Prague to meet for an "unconference" BoF. If you are interested in attending, please leave a reply or contact me by e-mail (laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com) with your availability. Wednesday is a candidate to benefit from the overlap between LPC and OSS. (3/5)

Plot twist: it turns out that if you're not careful about what you say on mailing lists, you risk getting invited to the Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit. While the invitation didn't provide any reason, I chose to believe it indicates that the kernel community cares. I'll dismiss my fears of being summoned as a human sacrifice on the altar of AI gods, and will try my best to represent the community members who don't feel they can speak out in public. (4/5)

I'm calling for community for help. If you would like your voice heard at the Maintainer Summit, please contact me by e-mail (laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com) to share your opinions on AI usage in the Linux kernel. Unless you explicitly request to be named, I will strictly respect your privacy and anonymize all the feedback I receive before sharing it with kernel maintainers. Please don't wait until the last minute as the week leading to the summit will be very busy. (5/5)

@pinchartl Thanks for doing this. There are a lot of people employed in companies that force AI usage and I suspect many don't want to be tagged as anti-AI because they fear for their jobs or how employable they'll be

@pinchartl I'm not a kernel developer, only a userspace developer. But if there's one thing I've learned over the past decades, it's that no FOSS project, no matter how big or important it seems, is eternal, and the only thing that ensures its existence is its community. Not its devs, not its users, but its community.

A move such as forcibly embracing AI despite the opinion of the community is the worst thing a project can make. People will not accept this. As far as Linux goes, they are already looking for alternative solutions.

Linux will lose significant support over this. It probably will not feel it harshly yet, but it will be weakened, its community fractured, less vibrant, and, face it, less competent. When, one day in the future, Linux dies, historians will point to this decision as the start of the decline.

I am sad.

@pinchartl I’ve used Linux professionally and personally since 1999 or so. The only reason I haven’t abandoned it in the last month is that the BSDs don’t have drivers available for my hardware. I won’t be buying anything else to run Linux on.

@ska
God damnit, Alpine. Why? Why‽

When are you making s6os forked from Alpine? Semi-kidding.

@Brett_E_Carlock I am never making a distribution. I know all too well how much time, specialized skill, and dedication this takes, and that's not the kind of project I am fit for leading. My energy is best employed writing software, not integrating it.

However, I am willing to support and help any distribution willing to take a stance against slop, and I am all the more available to them if they want to use s6.

@pinchartl My hat is off to you for what you're doing. Personally I've "arranged myself" with a series 5 kernel for Linux and some BSDs. In other words I have no hope for the kernel as it is now.

@pinchartl The linux kernel trust is gone. Unrepairable broken. And the linux kernel is tainted. I'm in the process of moving everything that I can away from linux.

I'm not forking of - I'm walking of.

F Torvalds.

@pinchartl Fuck AI.

I'm watching another developer on here basically revive debian/kfreebsd using netbsd as the base and my next reinstall (when devuan excalibur goes EOL) I'll probably follow their lead.

Linus said if you don't like AI fork the kernel, but I'm more a "switch projects" guy.

@pinchartl I also note I'm unlikely to use a newer kernel than 7.0 in mkroot. I don't trust the slop, don't see the POINT of all the rust, and they're throwing architectures overboard like a sinking ship dumping ballast.

@pinchartl I have made several threads about how Sashiko is driving me mad and I've corroborated similar stories from other small-time HID contributors. I can try and dig some of those up.

@pinchartl This post has a quick summary, and it's really just scratching the surface. I feel like these tools are waterboarding me, and I don't get to opt out. https://social.treehouse.systems/@endrift/117154802758493056

@pinchartl what particularly sucks is that Sashiko does reliably find issues...but only some of the issues are real. And sorting out the real ones from the hallucinated ones sucks for people who aren't super familiar with all the subsystems in question. It undoubtedly scares away smaller devs who don't have a vested interest in trying to upstream things.

@pinchartl I've seen you on mailing list advocating against AI and instantly recognized you from #libcamera on IRC, now I see you on fedi

Thank you, keep it up!

@ska @pinchartl Unix was 22 years old when Linux 0.0.1 came out and 25 when 1.0 shipped. Linux is 35 years old now.

@landley @pinchartl It had a good run, and it's not dead yet. But if it keeps going the way it is now, at some point something else is going to take its place.

@ska @pinchartl Technically old unix isn't quite dead yet, bits of aix and solaris still about. Nor is cobol or fortran.

But something anybody younger than 50 wants to touch?

@ska @pinchartl The thing that really annoys me about modern linux is 35 years in the churn keeps increasing rather than slowing down.

At some point a project is done. I use XFCE because it DOESN'T keep changing. I don't want a car where the steering wheel changes shape every 9 months, I don't open my laptop one day and see a dvorak keyboard.

But the diff between each linux release keeps getting BIGGER (while they delete hardware support), which is a sign of bureaucratic busywork not health.

@pinchartl Is this largely targeted at people who contribute to the kernel, or is this invitation inclusive of those of us who use Linux for whatever reason? (Personal computing, web hosting, development, etc)

I am more and more concerned about the harm AI is introducing, the political agendas the Slop boosters are embracing and pushing, and I do not have the spoons to migrate to something else like I think it’s NetBSD that’s pledged to be slop free? Is my taking time to write you an email helpful here as just an end user?

@deathkitten The invitation is open to anyone who would like to voice opinions relevant to the maintainer summit. There will be discussions about LLM usage in the Linux kernel, and my goal is to give all the community members who are traditionally not represented there a chance to get their voice heard. I will be grateful if you have time to send me an e-mail.

@pinchartl I will try to find the spoons to put somethig coherent together and send it. Can you confirm when I need to get it to you by to make sure it’s helpful? I just looked over the thread again, and didn’t see a specific date mentioned, and I’m not directly familiar with the event you’re looking to share this feedback at.

@deathkitten The maintainer summit will take place on Thursday. If you can, please share your opinions by Wednesday mid afternoon.

@endrift LLMs are in essence auto-complete machines trained on a corpus of text to find the most probable next words. Due to this nature, the errors they make sound very plausible to humans, even to the careful readers. It may not be a design goal, but it is at least a property of those systems that make reading AI-generated reviews or patches particularly unpleasant and time-consuming.

@ska @pinchartl several events during the 7.0 release cycle in march were also significant and relatively unmistakable signs that the project was not safe to depend on

@ska @pinchartl fwiw this is what i'm referring to (an explicit crypto backdoor) https://circumstances.run/@hipsterelectron/116289908719559861

I will try to organize multiple "hallway BoFs" to give as many people as possible a chance to join. If you are in Prague and would like to participate in the first one, look for me during the Monday morning break at 11:30 in the foyer in front of the Club A room. Please keep an eye on the LPC Hallway Track matrix room, I will post updates there in case of last minute changes.