Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies.
I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now.
I use LLMs at work without much thought by now. I'm also contributing a little bit to Sourcehut and keep my personal projects there.
While I'm not necessarily in the "LLMs are evil" camp, I find I respect this position a lot. I wish more people would do what they feel is right, even if that's going to result in a backlash from those who disagree.
When it comes to my personal projects, I realize I haven't really touched many of them in the LLM age. In a way, AI has made me uninterested in programming. This might actually be a nice demarcation line: keep my free range organic code on sourcehut and actively not use AI for my personal stuff. After all, LLMs (may) mostly help with speed (sometimes) - which was never the issue for the stuff I create "just because".
~51 in favor of the proposal. 20 of those specifically stated a desire for a blanket or as-strong-as-possible ban. 17 mentioned paying for the service. Many (sorry, didn't count these!) stated that the reason they joined SourceHut in the first place is because of the strongly opinionated culture and that an LLM ban aligns well with that.
~19 opposing the proposal to some degree. (I am counting Greg K-H's comments as a very weak "oppose".) 5 specifically mentioned paying for the service, and 1 stated they will stop paying if the policy takes effect. Some stated that they don't personally use LLMs, or don't like them or the effects they have, or would support a weaker ban (e.g. only ban fully vibe-coded projects or excessive resource usage).
> The new terms of service, which will go into effect for new projects after the usual two week notice period (i.e. September 10th), will now include the following under the list of prohibited content:
> - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies
> The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.
> As with our other policy changes, the intention is to roll this out slowly and thoughtfully. Each possible violation will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and we are open to making exceptions.
> Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy.
I think this is more of a nitpick than anything. SourceHut is a code forge, code forges are where you store your code (and tickets). The policy going forward is a ban on using LLMs to write code (and tickets). The use cases listed there (reviewing work, asking questions, etc) are minority use cases and mostly would be unenforceable even if included in the policy.
I am a paying supporter and I am considering to stop paying. This policy is a) dumb b) unenforceable. I pay them for infrastructure and service, not for some pseudo-moral ideas about how I should write my code. My code is as little of their concern, as things happening in my own house.
I've been a paying customer since... pretty much since I've first seen the project, which has been quite a few years.
I've always known the srht founders as rather strongly opinionated - for better and worse. This has always bothered me a bit, but I still strongly preferred it to Github and the likes.
And it didn't hit me either with the cryptocurrency related bans. Unfortunately this time, it does. And not because the policy is an anti complete slop policy, but because it bans relatively (at least to me) reasonable AI use as well.
Disappointing, sad, but not surprising. Moral grandstanding in the face of AI does little, it's already here to stay, whether we like it or not.
Drew convinced me that we should abolish copyright through his blog[1][2]. I find it very unfortunate that he uses the copyright licenses of the software hosted on SourHut as an argument against LLMs. Abolishing copyright means abolishing copyright for everyone, even you. Even if you don't like what people do with their copies.
I also find the reference to the energy consumption of AI dated a year and a half ago to be extremely unconvincing. The efficiency gains in AI over the course of the last year have probably been unparalleled in any other era of computing. The model (Qwen 3.8 27b) that I run on my own hardware on a single, high end gaming GPU, is often compared to the state of the art, massive frontier model from the beginning of this year. There was literally no amount of money you could pay to any company to run the biggest, most energy hungry AI model in existence at the time that the reference was written, that would even compare to the quality you can get out of a single GPU now.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Alice-in-Wonderland/
[2] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Sustainable-creativity-post-cop...
I use LLMs at work without much thought by now. I'm also contributing a little bit to Sourcehut and keep my personal projects there.
While I'm not necessarily in the "LLMs are evil" camp, I find I respect this position a lot. I wish more people would do what they feel is right, even if that's going to result in a backlash from those who disagree.
When it comes to my personal projects, I realize I haven't really touched many of them in the LLM age. In a way, AI has made me uninterested in programming. This might actually be a nice demarcation line: keep my free range organic code on sourcehut and actively not use AI for my personal stuff. After all, LLMs (may) mostly help with speed (sometimes) - which was never the issue for the stuff I create "just because".
Summary of the mailing list discussion (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CDKSTMKM0ZD9N....) - counted by hand without LLM assistance so there may be mistakes or misreadings :)
~51 in favor of the proposal. 20 of those specifically stated a desire for a blanket or as-strong-as-possible ban. 17 mentioned paying for the service. Many (sorry, didn't count these!) stated that the reason they joined SourceHut in the first place is because of the strongly opinionated culture and that an LLM ban aligns well with that.
~19 opposing the proposal to some degree. (I am counting Greg K-H's comments as a very weak "oppose".) 5 specifically mentioned paying for the service, and 1 stated they will stop paying if the policy takes effect. Some stated that they don't personally use LLMs, or don't like them or the effects they have, or would support a weaker ban (e.g. only ban fully vibe-coded projects or excessive resource usage).
> The new terms of service, which will go into effect for new projects after the usual two week notice period (i.e. September 10th), will now include the following under the list of prohibited content:
> - original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies
> The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.
> As with our other policy changes, the intention is to roll this out slowly and thoughtfully. Each possible violation will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and we are open to making exceptions.
It would be less misleading to also include:
> Moreover, the use of AI for purposes other than co-authoring code, tickets, emails, and so on, is discouraged but not prohibited. If you use LLMs privately to review your work, to ask questions of, to perform security analysis, and so on, and then write original code to push to SourceHut, your use-case is aligned with our policy.
I think this is more of a nitpick than anything. SourceHut is a code forge, code forges are where you store your code (and tickets). The policy going forward is a ban on using LLMs to write code (and tickets). The use cases listed there (reviewing work, asking questions, etc) are minority use cases and mostly would be unenforceable even if included in the policy.
I am a paying supporter and I am considering to stop paying. This policy is a) dumb b) unenforceable. I pay them for infrastructure and service, not for some pseudo-moral ideas about how I should write my code. My code is as little of their concern, as things happening in my own house.
You are literally paying them to be concerned about your code.
I've been a paying customer since... pretty much since I've first seen the project, which has been quite a few years. I've always known the srht founders as rather strongly opinionated - for better and worse. This has always bothered me a bit, but I still strongly preferred it to Github and the likes. And it didn't hit me either with the cryptocurrency related bans. Unfortunately this time, it does. And not because the policy is an anti complete slop policy, but because it bans relatively (at least to me) reasonable AI use as well.
Disappointing, sad, but not surprising. Moral grandstanding in the face of AI does little, it's already here to stay, whether we like it or not.
I wish there were reasonable alternatives.