Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@hbons/117099208164126991
Disgusting. Pausing my volunteer tablet driver contributions and any future Linux-related work until The Linux Foundation grows a bit of ethics. If they don’t change, I’ll look elsewhere.
The Linux Foundation had $300 million in revenue in 2025.
can't hire a designer.
absolutely pathetic.
@davidrevoy @ozzelot the linux foundation receiving a fuckton of money from multiple AI corporations (including Palantir) and paying Torvalds a $1.5 million/year paycheck is almost certainly the reason why Torvalds instituted an AI policy in the kernel that requires maintainers to use LLMs for review and encourages slop in the kernel. he evoked a right-wing conspiracy theory while doing it.
a lot of people have told you the Linux Foundation isn’t Linux, that they don’t matter, that you should keep contributing. that doesn’t make any sense if you think about it, does it. this is capitalism, and the person at the head of a project receiving large amounts of money certainly affects everyone who’s part of that project.
the Linux Foundation posting slop is a symptom of a sickness, but keep your eye on what matters. the kernel is rapidly becoming slop and it’s run by someone who very loudly dislikes you and me and everyone else who doesn’t like LLMs. you can do better with your time.
@zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot Please, I know Linus and most of the Linux kernel senior developers, and I've been covering Linux since Linus was a grad student. There is no policy requiring maintainers to use LLMs; there is no slop in the kernel, and Palantir is not an LF member.
@sjvn @zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot there is no war is ba sing se
@sjvn @zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot@mstdn.social
> there is no slop in the kernel,
this requires an extremely particular definition of "slop", favoured by AI promoters, and not the more common one that all AI output is slop.
There is slop in the kernel, and Torvalds posted welcoming it wholeheartedly.
@sjvn @zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot
“Palantir is not a LF member” but guess who is: OpenAI, Oracle, Google, Meta, M$, Anthropic, Actualyze Ai, Nvidia, Ai Craft Works, Ai Robotix, ASW, Cast Ai, Cielara Ai, Robotech Ai, RSMC.Ai, Spotify, Tencent, and many more with Ai agendas.
No way there isn’t slop in the kernel.
Please take your clown nose, contact Linus and tell him he’s a fucking idiot, a shill and to shut the fuck up with his slop addled mind.
@sjvn @davidrevoy @ozzelot you uh aren’t any good at paying attention to things that have been written down, are you?
you can literally just look up “linux foundation palantir” and see that they’ve entered into a partnership
you can just look up the current kernel policy that institutes the use of an LLM for automated code review, and the articles about how LLMs are making the kernel changelog bigger than it ever has been before because they’re just incorporating changes without checking if they’re slop or not because the LLM said they looked ok
you can literally just look up the post where your friend since grad school said that linux “isn’t a social warrior project” because he intended to call anyone anti-AI an SJW but figured that wouldn’t play well, so his ass deleted the word “warrior” from it
how were you friends with this guy for so long and you didn’t notice he’s a dickhead?
@sjvn @zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot There is no slop in the kernel? Are you using some definition of slop that isn't "words extruded from an LLM"? Cause it seems pretty obvious that it must, since Linus himself told people that don't like AI to fork it.
@yoasif @sjvn @zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot
> he told people who dont like ai to fork it
This is wrong, he only forbad forbidding ai.
Its not like an ai contributions ban would have been enforcable: either the human did a good enough job with the ai-assited change request, or it gets rejected as slop by the other maintainers, who are assumed to be competent to do so.
So the only thing Linuses move did is prevent threads like this one in their own discussions. This whole news item is neither dramatic nor interesting, and certainly nothing to be sad or angry about, even for people who hate LLMs from the bottom of their soul. Good reasons for that, but still.
@yoasif @sjvn @zzt @davidrevoy @ozzelot Sorry to butt in friends but I just have to share how many brain cells I've lost trying to imagine Linus playing a guitar. It's a lot.
@davidrevoy Just so everyone knows, the same applies to #wikipedia and the #wikimedia foundation:
Yes, they are also union busting.
@yoasif
> same applies to Wikipedia and the WikiMedia foundation. Yes, they are also union busting
Just when we need them the most. I wonder if it's practical to decentralise WP out from under the Foundation? It would certainly be possible to set up a parallel effort, as some kind of platform co-op. It wouldn't need to start from scratch, since WP is under FC licenses, and they could incorporate each others' changes.
@strypey @yoasif @davidrevoy if i had to prioritize between whether to decentralise one thing or another, i would have to say the #internetArchive (archive.org) has to take precedence over wikipedia i NEVER use wikipedia they are a political weapon, if it were democratised then googel would simply throw them in the trach heap.
Its the internet archive that is having to suffer with the ridiculous book "borrowing" larp etc. With i2p dying and they associated torrent sharing system dying we need a way to use Tor to share records of public interest and shared culture as a matter of urgency.
for the record i havent used goog search in a decade but i see others using it and they always getmisinformed either by wikipedia or increaing by the poorly quality LLM slop.
@frogzone
> if i had to prioritize between whether to decentralise one thing or another, i would have to say ... archive.org ... has to take precedence over wikipedia
Luckily we don't have to pick just one.
> i NEVER use wikipedia they are a political weapon
Thanks for this, I needed a laugh.
> If it were democratised then googel would simply throw them in the trach heap
Not sure what this has to do with anything.
@davidrevoy Uhg, gross...
I think what's most disappointing to me about *all* of this stuff is having spent so many years believing that FOSS was at least partially grounded in an ideology and a philosophy, and not just about being cheap and, well... sloppy.
It's difficult not to burn out, to be honest.
I have to remind myself that a lot of people really do care, and want to do what is right.
@emmetoneill
> having spent so many years believing that FOSS was at least partially grounded in an ideology and a philosophy
The problem here is "FOSS", which mashes together 2 totally different philosophies. Software freedom ("Free Software") is exactly what you thought " FOSS" was about. Then came Open Source, which opened the door to corporate shitfuckery like the Linux Foundation and Mozilla Foundation/ Corporation (the latter owned by the former, both utterly captured).
@strypey @emmetoneill @davidrevoy
Agree. This is precisely why I still release the vast majority of my code under GPL2.0, although I know that's now both superceded and wildly unfashionable.
@simon_brooke
> This is precisely why I still release the vast majority of my code under GPL2.0
2 questions;
1) How does this relate to the philosophical differences between software freedom and openness as motivations for libre software licensing?
2) Why GPLv2 and not GPLv3 or AGPLv3? FYI Linus sticks with v2 for Linux so that the corporations who pay his salary can keep tivoizing their products, preventing their customers using their full software freedoms.
@strypey @emmetoneill @davidrevoy
Why V2 and not V3? Laziness; and I haven't really understood the difference between V2 and V3 and don't trust lawyers.
Why GPL and not (for example) BSD or Apache? Because if you want to use my #GiftEconomy work you can bloody well share your work in the gift economy too.
@simon_brooke
> if you want to use my gift economy work you can bloody well share your work in the gift economy too
OK, so in answer to my first question, what you were advocating for is copyleft licensing, as a way of extending software freedom protection to everyone using derivatives of the software. I agree, and I advocate for appropriate copyleft licenses as a default.
(1/?)
@davidrevoy The problem is that there's no real "elsewhere", linux being the only remotely mature alternative to proprietary systems and a lesser evil compared to them.
@Stem Maybe my main problem is just with the "Linux Foundation" ethic itself, and I need to start thinking about it totally appart from the "Linux GPL community code repository". But it's hard.
@davidrevoy It’s the year of the BSDesktop
@davidrevoy I get you, and the Linux Foundation has been a bunch of horrible assholes for a very long time. They're basically a who's who of the most awful corporations on the planet at this point - Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon are platinum members. Fucking Anthropic is a gold member.
But they don't own Linux.
@datarama @davidrevoy Geuine question, what does the linux foundation like... do for linux actually.
Like I'm not being facetious or anything, just reading the wikipedia page makes it looks like an astroterfing thing where they just throw money at random BS. Sucks they have that Linux url though.
@catboy_of_the_seaaa
> what does the linux foundation like... do for linux actually
I believe they pay Linus' salary as BDFL of the Linux kernel, and quietly fund of bunch of R&D on low level components nobody ever hears about. But the GNU/Linux OS that people casually call "Linux" could carry on quite happily without them. Especially if, for example, the EU funded a distribution for public use, with plans for sustaining it if upstream dev stopped.
@datarama Right. That's is also a good point. Thank you for reminding me this.
@davidrevoy @datarama seriously, ignore the linux foundation, it's everything bad about corporate foss. Big corps lording over and coopting community work, when they're not too busy self dealing.
Anyone thinking BSD is some green pasture of freedom, good effing luck. The hardware support alone would turn my daily driver into a paperweight. I love that BSD exists, but it need a community that's a bit more than server racks and zfs pools. Linux is only just growing out of that mindset.
@AlexanderMars @datarama Yes, I think the advice of ignoring the Linux Foundation is one I'll keep in mind. Thank you!
Is there even a viable "elsewhere" left? BSD is even less prepared than Linux on the desktop
@csolisr there's a couple semi-reasonable BSD desktop choices like GhostBSD
I tried GhostBSD once, the fact that the most modern desktop it can ship is MATE (because anything more recent depends at least partly on systemd), and that it's an atomic distribution (that is, any single update requires rebooting the entire OS to apply) made it not quite good enough for my usage case, unfortunately.
@csolisr That's a question for later. I just know that when I left Windows Vista and adopted Linux, no professional artist was using it. Whatever I decide next, I'm not afraid to pioneer a little bit.
Unlike proprietary software the value is not in the thing as written, but in the ongoing labour and the ability to organise labour for that thing
Free Software is a fundamentally different proposition and it hurts me when folks misunderstand and imagine Linux is something akin to Windows that you either bare the pain of or depart for elsewhere.
The kernel's Labour is driven by hardware vendors, not users. A friendly reminder that our broken economics opens terrible doors
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