On the Fedora forums, there’s a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at “AI”. The “problem” identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the “AI” space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier. Setting aside the “AI” of the proposal and ensuing discussion, it’s actually a very interesting read, going deep into the weeds about consequential questions like building an LTS kernel on Fedora, support for out-of-tree kernel mods, and a lot more.
To spoil the ending: the proposal has already been approved unanimously by the Fedora Council, meaning the efforts laid out in the proposal will be undertaken. This means that, depending on progress, we’ll see a Fedora “AI” Desktop or whatever it’s going to be called somewhere in the timeframe from Fedora 45 to Fedora 47. As a Fedora user on all my machines, I’m obviously not too happy about this, since I’d much rather the scarce resources of a project like Fedora goes towards things not as ethically bankrupt, environmentally destructive, and artistically deficient as “AI”, but in the end it’s a project owned and controlled by IBM, so it’s not exactly unexpected.
What really surprised me in this entire discussion is a post by Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta, responding to worries people in the thread were having about such a big “AI” undertaking under the Fedora branding causing serious reputational damage to Fedora as a whole. These concerns are clearly valid, as people really fucking hate “AI”, doubly so in the open source community whose work especially “AI” coding tools are built on without any form of consent. As such, Fedora undertaking a big “AI” desktop project is bound to have a negative impact on Fedora’s image. Just look at what aggressively pushing Copilot has done to Windows 11’s already shit reputation.
Spaleta, however, just doesn’t care. Literally.
As the Fedora Project Leader, I am absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project that comes with setting up an entirely new output attractive to developers who want to make use of Ai tools.
↫ Jef Spaleta
I’ve been looking at this line on and off for a few days now, and I just can’t wrap my head around how the leader of an open source project built on and relying on the free labour of thousands of contributors says he doesn’t care about reputational damage to the project he’s leading. Effective and capable open source contributors are not exactly a commodity, and a lot of the decisions they make about what projects to donate their time to are based on vibes and personal convictions – you can’t really pay them to look the other way. Saying you don’t care about reputational damage to your huge open source project seems rather shortsighted, but of course, I don’t lead a huge open source project so what do I know?
In the linked thread alone, one long-time Fedora contributor, Fernando Mancera, already decided to leave the project on the spot, and I have a sneaking suspicion he won’t be the last. “AI” is a deeply tainted hype on many levels, and the more you try to chase this dragon, the more capable people you’ll end up chasing away.
This seems completely reasonable to me. (Emphasis added.)
runciblebatleth,
This is what I’ve been saying too. Many don’t like it, but AI is here to stay. Despite all the cons we can talk about here, the labor cost savings provide an enormous incentive for big businesses and honestly I don’t see a likely scenario where they steer us away. So long as they want AI, that’s all it takes for it to succeed. Even a recession would likely result in human layoffs and position AI for more growth in the future.
I think the interests of FOSS/privacy/responsible/etc advocates are best served not by staying clear of AI, but by putting forward ethical AI of our own that sets a good example and helps to ensure we have more options in the future. Otherwise I think we may inadvertently make the future of AI worse as our actions today cede ground to some future proprietary corporate AI monopolies. Not only does that fail to stop AI, but it weakens FOSS in the future when AI keeps becoming more important.
Have you read the whole discussion? I did. They are not against AI explicitly but concerned about saying Fedora AI desktop is now a Fedora objective. A project leader that does not care about the image of the project is.. something.
All the work could have happened without calling it Fedora AI but Red Hat wants to sell the AI fantasy to everyone. The tone from the Fedora Project Leader in the whole thread is also off-putting. “I am the most important person in the room”. At least I don’t use Fedora.
sssv78,
Jef Spaleta did speak somewhat to that point.
I do not think leaders should dismiss or ignore the community, that’s a problem. I currently don’t have the data to say which way the community leaning, however I still feel that the words runciblebatleth highlighted have truth to them. My position on AI generally hasn’t been to deny there are cons, Not everyone follows my endless rants 🙂 but know that I am very sympathetic to the view that AI will make things worse for many workers, especially entry level labor that is the low hanging fruit for AI. My position is not that the cons aren’t real or aren’t significant, and I don’t even deny there’s a lot of AI garbage. If people want to criticize that, fine, but we need to see the forest through the trees; cherry picking the worst examples of AI is not a great indicator for where things are headed. The AI that will last is that which serves corporate interests, for better or worse they don’t really give a damn about our concerns and will proceed with their own interests in mind. It seems very unlikely to me that corporations would change so much as to make AI less attractive to them in the future.
I didn’t realize Lennart Poettering was there 🙂
I get the sentiment, but ask yourself this: in a world where AI underpins the future, would you rather the FOSS community be at the table to help shape AI favorably, or let proprietary companies take the reins without any challengers?
Thom Holderda,
Some nuance is required here. Many FOSS licenses do in fact give consent for downstream projects to use the code without asking. That’s the whole point of licenses like the GPL. GPL requires downstream projects to be licensed under the GPL. There’s a debate whether or not LLMs works are “transformative”, which put’s it out out of copyright scope. But even for those who take the position that LLMs are not transformative and are copyrightable, there’s nothing inherently anti-FOSS about LLMs, The problem is not that copyleft can’t (or shouldn’t) be used to train LLMs, but that LLMs works should themselves be copyleft also.
In fact the GPL licenses (v2 and v3 alike) prohibit us from adding new AI restrictions…
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html
I’m highlighting a sentence here but it’s not that long read it in full to see that you really can use GPL code to train an LLM in good faith if your LLM’s output also respects the GPL. I really believe this would be a stronger case to advance the cause of FOSS than to argue that AI can’t comply with FOSS. This isn’t only untrue, but I believe there’s a very serious risk of it backfiring by creating a void of FOSS compliant AI.