Linux

"You are responsible for the code you submit, regardless of tools used."

Literally the same stance Linus had on Linux. I'm okay with it as long as it's enforced.

This isn't a bad policy, but outright ignoring ethical and environmental concerns doesn't seem very wise either. That should still be discussed, even if this becomes the final version of the policy.

i like how people exaggerated this into "oh no, KDE is s|op now". I totally get the hate for greedy and overhyping ai corpos, but if this policy is a sign of slop, you a) most probably never coded anything in your life b) unaware that before ai-slop there was natural, human-produced(tm) slop and dumb stackoverflow copypasta that barely even worked.

This seems fine

This seems fine to me, it's all they can really do since banning AI entirely just isn't possible; someone could use it and submit very high quality code and no one would know AI was involved.

This. Dunno where I'm going to go once KDE starts collapsing under the weight of AI slop. XFCE maybe? Do they have an AI policy? What's Cosmic looking like these days?

As a user, I think this is the biggest issue I have with this policy. Disclosure is a big part of open source and hiding whatever tools are used is fundamentally against that philosophy.

I feel like using ai is like using drugs, they're bad, but regulating them is muuuuuuuch better than just prohibiting, people will use it anyways.

It's not a one to one comparison but I feel encouraging witch hunts will definitely do more harm than normalizing it.

To be clear, I don't want it either, I'm acknowledging it's the lesser of two evils.

I'll likely be switching my gaming PC to Gnome due to all this :\

(on a side note, the Gnome dev in that thread mentions that Gnome bans AI usage, but I haven't been able to find anything that confirms that, and AFAICT Gnome doesn't have an official AI usage policy, only Gnome Circle does for 3rd party Gnome Extensions).

The contribution policy is the only place where anything meaningful can be done, as that is ultimately what will influence developers trying to contribute. Putting environmental concerns anywhere else is, IMHO, just toothless virtue signalling.

I personally consider advocating for non-disclosure of AI use to be Pro-AI. Advocating for disclosure but still allowing it would be neutral.

I don't really see why environmental policy shouldn't be mentioned in the contribution policy. If it's there as the justification for why a part of the policy exists and it is accurate about what the environmental impacts actually are, it seems to fit in fine within the policy? Not wanting the point there doesn't make KDE pro-AI (since they might just want to mention it elsewhere), but it is valid criticism if they don't acknowledge it anywhere.

However I do feel that the other points in the post are weaker. KDE's stance is in line with what the SFC recommends when it comes to AI in FOSS, specifically around contributions. I came across the SFC recommendations a while back and it's held up well in similar discussions so far: https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html

Devs rejecting any notion of transparency by disclosing AI usage in code submissions

I don't think they rejected the transparency part? I agree that transparency is necessary. Rather their reply is telling the commenter to not shun people. Both of those points are reflected in the SFC recommendations (point 5 on disclosure and point 3 on shunning)

And all of this is coming right after the debacle with an AI slop project being allowed to give a presentation at Akademy, and the person asking how this was allowed being blocked by KDE

I get the feeling that KDE does not curate much of anything, for better or for worse. There is a good bit of content in the KDE ecosystem that is outdated or straight up shovelware.

On top of that, Akademy is a conference that is intended for discussion, rather than a presentation about KDE.

Akademy features a 2-day conference with presentations on the latest KDE developments, followed by 4 days of workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) and coding sessions. It is an opportunity to meet key KDE contributors, learn about the latest features and enjoy the great atmosphere. You will meet developers, artists, translators, upstream and downstream maintainers, users, and free and open software industry leaders from all over the world

It wouldn't work well if they had to curate every presentation at such an event. It is indeed deceitful to imply that the presenter is going to change the direction of KDE if in reality they rarely contribute and have little say in the direction of KDE. Also IMO it's good that they let that guy participate in the conversation because it let everyone else raise points about why the idea is bad.

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#desktop-environments

https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware#window-managers

tl;dr:

• Lumina, Lumina NG, and GNOME (not mentioned) are good choices of DE
• bspwm, River, Sway, and Openbox are good choices of WM. The two options in bold have anti-AI policies, while the rest are simply untainted. Openbox is safer than the rest, as it has been feature-complete since 2010, and therefore only gets occasional patches.
• Niri has also recently changed its policy to ban the use of AI. It is unclear whether they will still use it for code reviews, but from the perceived tone of the text, this will probably also stop.

Edit: Good find @heliotrope@slrpnk.net, that list increases our options significantly.

This list contains ~~the only~~ some known DE's that openly reject AI. Basically just a couple window managers.

Pretty much every major full blown DE accepts or uses AI. Gnome and Cinnamon have no official stances

That section only relates to descriptions of pull requests, not the AI code itself. They don't want long rambly AI generated explanations of how the code works, but they are fine if the code itself is AI generated.

what can they do despite ban LLM usage altoguether (and per consequence get LLM generated code submitted anyway), they can't have a blacklist for models, or force contributors to run them on their local hardware.

But they can? Like OP pointed out, wine forbids contributions from those that have seen Windows source code. How in the world are they supposed to enforce that? Turns out the open source community is pretty good at self enforcing.

It makes no distinction between self-hosted LLMs or Corportate LLMs, and disregards the dangers of using LLM code in FLOSS projects due to copyright concerns and the environmental and social damage corporate AI causes. For more details:

1. Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.

2. Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.

3. I'm wary of the potential effects of AI usage resulting in declining or stagnating critical thinking based on some preliminary studies (example 1, example 2).

4. I do not think LLMs can be "just a tool" as many claim.

5. 99% of LLMs (the ones virtually everyone use) are trained on copyrighted code that is incompatible with GPL licensed projects. LLMs have a 3 to 10% chance to unknowingly reproduce the copyrighted code perfectly, introducing legal plagiarism into an open-source project, which could easily open up the developers to being sued in the future if companies scanned open source repos for copyright violations.

6. Many courts are ruling that LLM generated code cannot be copyrighted at all, meaning that it also cannot be legally made GPL, losing the protections from corporate exploration the GPL normally grants. https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

AI is not a thing, it doesn't act, it doesn't think. Humans do. Humans nudify children, humans enshitify software, humans steal content