Debian Opens a General Resolution on LLM-Written Contributions — Four Competing Proposals, From Outright Ban to Explicit Permission
The discussion period on Debian's 2026 GR #002 began July 24 with four seconded proposals. Matthias Geiger's would add a Section 6 to the Social Contract prohibiting any contribution "written with the use or assistance of large language models" (8 seconders, incl. Ian Jackson). Lucas Nussbaum's permits AI-assisted work under six conditions — tool license compatibility, contributor accountability, mandatory disclosure, prior discussion of bulk changes (9 seconders, incl. Stefano Zacchiroli). Ian Jackson's discourages LLMs, requires human-drafted messages to humans, and makes violations a Code of Conduct matter. Pierre-Elliott Bécue's "does not endorse" but accepts AI work with commit-level marking and a ban on cloud AI for confidential data (6 seconders, incl. Russ Allbery). Whatever wins sets the reference policy other distros and large FOSS projects will copy.
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