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

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 I agree! How can we spread the free software philosophy while using tools and supporting companies that don't care about it? That are harming the same planet we're trying to make better!

@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@toot.aquilenet.fr $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@toot.aquilenet.fr 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).

@civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr @admin@mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com 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@mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com @civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr

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?