GenAI reaches another unexpected corner of #FreeSoftware: the #Hurd
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-02/msg00133.html

Like the Emacs-in-Rust thing¹, it’s another pipe dream project with scarce humanpower.

¹ https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/116099711903317535

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.

It’s probably easier for a big project like Gentoo to say “no” to genAI—they have enough contributors anyway, they don’t need it.

So what do we do?

I think we need solidarity. We need to recognize the harms of genAI, including from a free software standpoint.

And we need bigger projects to show the way: to clearly state their rejection, and not on the grounds of quality assurance—a concern bound to become irrelevant—but really on the grounds of ethics, refusing to be part of the harm this does to society.

@civodul this is crazy and sudden. Why is this happening at once everywhere???

So yes, maybe we’ll have to give up on some dreams—like the year of the Hurd on the desktop.

But in exchange, we’ll get something more valuable: human beings sharing their passion, helping each other, and building things together. The real asset of free software.

@tusharhero Because it’s so tempting? And “everyone does it”, and “look how it could benefit our project”.

@civodul there are more of us every day, and i take comfort in that amidst the deluge coming in from every angle. this isn't over yet, but we need some way to rally and push back en masse, rather than the current ad hoc approach.

genai is fractally immoral, unrecoverably so, and that needs to be front-and-center. everything else is shifting sands, easily ceded.

@civodul everyone also distributes nonfree software. Doesn't mean we should also do it...

@civodul Please Ludo, GNU Guix and GNU Hurd need to reject LLMs. I am going to request this to other FSF/GNU projects as well. I am in the process of writing a campaign where we actively pledge against this.

I know it's difficult for small scale free software projects to find contributions and support, but we cannot lose our ethics. I will personally donate and try to contribute more to projects who take the ethical stance. The hackers shall win in the long run! We cannot pollute our codebases with such code, we might inherit a lot of tech debt from this.

@civodul ...so HURD is no longer fully GPL? Because if they're using AI generated code, that's the result. Can't copyright it, so you can't GPL it.

@civodul $748 in less than a week!!!!! I get that they only paid $100 because of a temporary subscription deal, but holy shit… That’s a lot of compute. How many guix subsitutes do you think could be built with $748 of compute?

@civodul from Baccula’s paper:

When Brent started this project on February 16, he purchased a Claude Max subscription for $100/month. This subscription provides a fixed allocation of usage—not per-token billing—for both interactive sessions and the claude –print API calls that the task runner uses. The actual cost of this project is $100/month, not the per-token amounts shown in the task runner’s cost tracking.
The per-token costs reported by the API represent what the usage would cost at retail API rates: approximately $297 across 169 task runs with billing data (plus ∼$111 estimated for 31 runs without billing), and ∼$338 for 11 interactive sessions—roughly $746 total at retail rates. They are useful for understanding relative expense between tasks, but they are not what was actually paid. At retail API rates, the project would have cost over seven times the subscription price—the subscription is a much better deal for heavy usage.

@amy Anthropic claims they spent $20k on the Claude C Compiler (probably underestimated, but that gives an idea).

@admin The LLM output is public domain. If it’s “legally significant” (10 lines of code or more), and if these LLM-produced contributions are not clearly identified, then one could consider the whole as public domain, AIUI.

@civodul @admin It varies by jurisdiction. In the US, LLM output cannot be copyrighted and is public domain, but in the UK it can be copyrighted and the copyright holder is whoever prompted the LLM (assuming the LLM is not plagiarizing anything, which is questionable).

If it’s “legally significant” (10 lines of code or more), and if these LLM-produced contributions are not clearly identified, then one could consider the whole as public domain, AIUI.

Does that mean that you can make any program (or even any copyrighted work) public domain by adding LLM output to it and not clearly marking it? That can’t be right…

Wow, I had not heard of that project. I did hear about browser that doesn’t compile costing a lot as well though.

@noisytoot @civodul If you can get that code merged, yes, that seems to be the case.

Of course, if the person submitting the code fraudulently claims to hold the copyright -- which I think most open source projects would require before accepting the submission -- then things get more complicated legally. No idea how that would work out. But if they know it's generated and they accept the code and don't disclose and disclaim it then yes, at some point they lose copyright.

@admin @civodul

If you can get that code merged, yes, that seems to be the case.

Unless there’s a CLA or copyright assignment, contributors retain copyright and the project maintainers have no special status or rights other than those granted to everyone by the license. It doesn’t really make sense that a project maintainer’s decision to merge a contributor’s LLM-generated code can relicense code written by other people.

Otherwise what would prevent me from, say, forking Linux, merging partially LLM-generated code into my fork, then declaring that all of Linux (or my fork of it, which is almost identical) is now public domain?

@noisytoot @civodul Hmm, does Hurd not have a CLA? I kinda assumed all the GNU projects required assigning copyright, the FSF is pretty big on that, but looks like maybe not.

So in that case you have to disclose/disclaim anyway in order to retain the individual copyrights, so yes that shouldn't risk the copyright of the entire project. But you still can't really license any AI code under the GPL.

@admin @noisytoot The Hurd has copyright assignment, but not Mach (the microkernel), which has its roots outside GNU.

@noisytoot @admin This is one interpretation I’ve read, but I guess it’s a grey area.