Free Software and LLM Contribution Policies

Multiple free software (or open source) projects have policies that forbid, or in some cases allow with extra scrutiny and scepticism, contributions that are supported by AI-augmented tools. I believe that this is a poor decision for many reasons, which fall under these categories: The Four Freedoms Free Software and Copyright Freedom to Fork Historical Discontinuities Unintended Consequences Miscategorized Assumptions I will present my argument on each point, then conclude by saying the policy I believe that these projects would be better served with. This is just my suggestion, of course, I’m not in a leadership position on any of the projects and I’ve only contributed to them in minor ways. 1. The Four Freedoms. Central to the philosophy of free software – and transitively to the open source philosophy – are the four freedoms. The GNU project website spells them out in full, but I like the pithy summary from FSF Europe: ‘use, study, share, improve’. Given these freedoms as…