incredible take from one of the GNU maintainers, seriously
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@ariadne Yikes. I honestly can't think of a more introductory ethics principle than "Legal =/= Ethical"
Literally. Walk in, sit down, "okay, class..." and that's the exact thing you'd start with.
@ariadne That is par for the course, just like the paragraph after:
> Any other answer is a first step towards splitting our community along
the many lines of political and ideological divides
The implication that answering yes to slave labor for the benefit of GNU would expectedly be unquestionable and unanimously agreeable is baffling, but also very much expected from GNU.
Still, people better not start calling them a death cult, what next? Acknowledge the fact that they put the project above everything and everyone else? Worship a single man as their prophet? Claiming that they would be willing to sacrifice humanity to save some crumbling software? Crazy talk. Conspiracy theory. It is heretic to have such thoughts about pillars of FOSS. To question GNU is akin to question the entire temple.
And yet, in a hypothetical example: if they found out one of 8 billion people has magic blood that can be used in a ritual to elevate any GNU project to never before achieved potential, and they knew that person is not RMS, would they kill 8 billion people to find the right one? Their answer must be YES.
@ariadne I recall a friend that submitted a bug patch to a project. They wanted him to agree to the "code of conduct" before accepting it. He refused. Why should he agree to be bound by anything? He found the bug, made the patch and gave it to the community under public domain. The "community" would not accept the fix.
This sounds like a more extreme version of this. While obviously I don't agree with slavery, code is code and does not and should not care about the life of the contributor.
WTAF!
Would love to find out who the moronic c**t is, that penned that utter fucking horseshit.
@ariadne
Given that North Korea exists, the idea of software being produced by forced labour is far from hypothetical, I would say.
@ariadne Doubling down, too.
"If we start talking about genocide, that's bad, let's brush it all aside! Don't mix sport and politics!"
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-11/msg00201.html
@ariadne
Woa, these people have some severe issues. Are they just stupid or crazy?
@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
Isn’t the “hypothetical example” the definition of Work?
@skeyby work generally is voluntary in exchange for money
@ariadne wait, wat
"must be YES"? is someone forcing the GNU project to accept all legally-valid contributions?
what kind of weak-ass nonsense is that
like regardless of what you feel about LLMs, it is very easy to just do/say anything other than "contributions resulting from slavery are good, actually"
@ariadne FWIW, The Nuremberg trials or vegans had/have to constantly deal with this question and drew the boundary between "I'm merely benefiting" vs "I'm actively encouraging it".
Basically you have three options accept it/ask for changes/reject it. Changes are out of the question since you are encouraging slavery.
The correct response* is to accept the contribution and inform the contributor that no further such contribution will be accepted so the harm has not been done in vain.
@ariadne Somehow I am not surprized. Somehow.
@ariadne huh, so that settles vim vs emacs then
If a libertarian is accepting the product of slave labor, he may not be libertarian at least not the original definition
@ariadne goddamnit emacs could you stop embarrassing me when I recommend you for like five goddamn minutes
@glyph @ariadne I'm still disgusted and mad about this hours later
(but seriously, fucking text editors nowadays
vim: "we are now allowing slop"
neovim: "we are allowing slop and are also fascists"
emacs, months later: "we would totally accept slop, and also, we're super cool with slave labor (software freedom is more important than human freedom (except mine, obviously))")
@glyph right? irregardless of his views on LLMs, it is very easy to just not engage with the argument at the very least. nothing made him reply that way.
@ariadne @gsuberland holy crap. Who? What project, or are they responsible for multiple projects, or policy, or…? When? Where?
This is not an expression of doubt. GNU and the FSF have a long and proud tradition of disappointing me greatly. I just need some context to hook it to.
@ariadne @randomgeek @gsuberland my favorite excerpt from this exchange:
There's a lot of evil in this world, and we meet it all the time. In
the Free Software movement, we only deal with evil that directly
affects or threatens software freedoms. Fighting the rest should be
left for other arenas.
as if the usage of LLM-generated code does not presently and significantly affect software freedoms (by flooding repositories with insecure garbage and making projects harder to support and maintain, and probably for other reasons i can't think of right now)
@ariadne entirely expected take from the "csam is fine actually" defenders
the stewards of the free software movement, everyone.
and then people wonder why FOSS has a misogyny problem.
@ariadne Time to burn all this shit down and start over.
@ariadne
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-11/msg00126.html
The response came from Eli Zaretskii, one GNU maintainer, who is an asshole. A zealot with a narrow minded view of the ethics that should be employed for emacs development, prizing above all else the avoidance of community fracture, even at the cost of basic morals. He doesn't speak for all.