Post by @reflex@retrogaming.social

2026-10-29 00:25 UTC

@dch@bsd.network @FreeBSDFoundation@mastodon.social I get that, but the unwillingness of FreeBSD as an organization to actually make a decision on whether or not they will permit LLM generated code, documentation or other contributions makes every single one of these types of press releases imply you are heading down the same road that the Linux Foundation and eventually Linux have gone down. I could assume good faith if there was a strong policy in place to prevent that outcome. Until then I can't.

Replies (1)

@dch@bsd.network 2026-10-29 12:49

@reflex@retrogaming.social you are preaching to the converted here. I put a lot of effort trying to have an interim policy published in the last core term, but was ultimately unsuccessful. There is an active Working Group that I hope can thread the needle appropriately, which I'm not part of btw. All I can say is that FreeBSD has a very diverse set of stakeholders, from large corporations that have internally embraced LLM tooling completely, yet other orgs who have concerns about future legal liability, to pro AI accelerators & to hard No AI users, and to businesses and dabblers somewhere in the middle that have not yet made their choices. At the same time, the project is having the same massive load from AI scrapers on its infrastructure, and the volunteers that maintain it, that all open source organisations face today, and the same pressure from a 20x rise in volume of external bug submissions, thanks to LLMs. Those are real bugs, and we want to fix them. I don't believe there is one simple clear answer anymore that can adequately represent both a broad consensus, and fairly address all the concerns that people have. So like many people I'm looking forwards to how far the WG can go to find a sweet spot. @FreeBSDFoundation@mastodon.social

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