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iamnothere

Interesting to watch the rapid fragmentation of FOSS into “hard” anti-AI, AI-neutral-to-discouraged, AI-supplemented, and AI-driven camps, akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars. Suddenly I don’t see as many complaints about licensing, and some of the die-hard GPL stans are silently dropping that position as Linux adopts AI-supplemented development.

On one hand it’s unfortunate, because it hypothetically dilutes developer efforts, but on the other hand the most extreme groups already had incompatible personalities and weren’t working well together. This self-sorting may actually result in a better cadence and less energy wasted on arguing.

The downside is that a lot of loud and annoying people seem to be converging on BSD land. I am AI-nonaligned (I just care about Quality) but I’m very much in favor of OpenBSD’s heads-down focused dev culture. I hope that doesn’t change.

rjsw
The reason for NetBSD rejecting any use of AI is the concern that a future legal case will rule that the output of LLMs trained on GPL code is itself subject to the GPL due to the viral clause in the licence.
- ForHackernews
  God that would be amazing. How incredible would it be if basically all software was free?
  - JSR_FDED
    
    It would be amazing because while unemployed you’d have all the time in the world to play with that software
    
    NoidFonsense
    
    Are you saying we would all be unemployed if everything is GPL'd?
    Now it's the case that almost all software can be reverse engineered by AI. So the moat will be eroded regardless. Filthy copyleft or not.
    
    red-iron-pine
    
    hey now -- i'd be working hard as a barista. totally employed.
    but all the code would be free.
    
    ForHackernews
    
    There are non-software jobs, and also paid work supporting and developing free software.
    With the arrival of AI, many of us will need to career change anyway.
    
    NoidFonsense
    
    Many are already unemployed
  - throwaway27448
    
    The chances american courts would find for this is basically zero. Maybe in other markets....
    
    lproven
    
    Fortunately for the ROTW, there are hundreds of other countries, and the USA is working as hard and as fast as it can to become disunited and tear itself apart.
    
    rjsw
    
    I think that some of the arguments in the Apple vs OpenAI case may lead to a ruling on whether copyright gets stripped or not by running something through an LLM.
    If it is established that copyright is retained then someone else could follow up on the GPL aspects.
  - rjsw
    
    ... or commercial software vendors would roll back a couple of years in their VCS and start again from that point.
    
    promano
    
    Sure, but they would still be required to open the source code of the last version they distributed before that roll back, which could then be forked.
    
    limagnolia
    
    Generally, courts have levied fines for copyright infringement rather than forcing ooen sourcing of code. The times when code has been open sourced are usually settlements to avoid a fine.
    
    MrMorden
    
    It's hard to convince a court to order specific performance, and this is not the sort of case where it's at all likely to happen.
- F3nd0
  I assume the reason was more generally non-permissive licensing and legal issues? Specifically seeing only copyleft as the problem sounds unreasonably sociopathic, so I assume you picked that out as just one prominent example. (That, or I should take care to steer clear of NetBSD.)
  - spauldo
    
    In context it seems they're concerned about clear ownership of the code. It's lumped in with rules about not submitting code that might not have clear licensing or ownership. Here's the specific part from NetBSD's Commit Guidelines:
    Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.
cowanon77
I think it's a good thing. In a couple of years we'll have a clear way to measure the true productivity and impact (or lack thereof) of AI on software dev. It's the perfect "natural experiment".
- myaccountonhn
  
  They don't do it for productivity. There's a summary of anti-llm motivations in the ToS change announcement for Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/
- WesBrownSQL
  We have ways to measure productivity now. AI doesn't change what to measure unless you just want to flex. Every time I see "100k lines of code, all AI," I think they probably could have done the same thing with a fraction of that. Anytime productivity is measured that way, you will always fail. As a CTO, my mantra was "I pay for outcomes, not hours." AI coding tools are just that, tools. My outlook on that hasn't changed. I enjoy working with LLM's especially locally, to handle quite a bit of the heavy lifting. I'm not paying for tokens, I'm paying for outcomes.
  - atherton94027
    
    Which ways do we have to measure productivity for open source software? Most of the tooling around that still focus on lines of code and cyclomatic complexity
- asf_opp
  No. If an open source project allows small amounts of LLM slop to please their foundation donors, is all productivity in that project due to LLMs? Of course not.
  If 10 of 20 developers work for corporations and have to pretend that their code is AI written to please the corporations, is that AI productivity?
  The advertising and social pressure machinery is so AI heavy right now because most techies are cowards and only speak up on issues (including DEI as we see since Trump) if HR tells them to.
  Then of course many projects like Linux or git are entrenched. You can't copy Unix and bitkeeper like Linus did and be immediately successful, because the whole culture is against you (unlike in the 1990s, when the culture was anti-Microsoft).
  So yeah, if Gen-Alpha declares OpenAI and Anthropic the new Microsoft and builds up a new counter-culture, then in 10 years you might have some clue.
  Otherwise, we have to stick to the current situation and observe that no software has gotten better since AI.
  - cwbriscoe
    
    I am still anti-microsoft in 2026.
  - bobthebuilders
    
    So if software is developed with AI and that's better then we should discount AI's contribution, but if software is developed without AI is better then obviously it's because AI had no productivity boost?
- serf
  projected ideology doesn't really match reality, so not really.
  detecting AI written code without a minder chained to your arm watching your every movement is still a topic of research...
  ...and as someone who has been to the last 10 miscellaneous FSF/GNU celebrations I can tell you that community has just as many license cheaters and scoundrels as the rest of the computing world, they just tend to bias towards the good stuff, similarly to how every microsoft employee isn't required to drink the blood of infants (it just looks good on quarterlies.)
  - quixoticelixer-
    
    It doesn't need to be 0% ai vs 100% ai for the comparison to work.
pantalaimon

It's basically the Amish of IT.
The shift is like that from horse drawn carriage to motor vehicle.
NegativeLatency

Not exactly the same but I’ve noticed I have less conflict over code at work too now that everyone’s using llms to generate and review it.
g-b-r
Projects that decided to welcome AI of course don't care of its possible licensing problems.
Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.
- iamnothere
  It’s possible that they have different interpretations of how generated code affects licensing, but I think in general everyone is now abandoning old positions on licensing. It’s an exciting time for those of us who dislike copyright, something is bound to shift soon.
  Whatever its stance towards the GPL, Linux has become the default home of GPL land with the exception of the few dedicated souls still working on Hurd. (I hope they keep making steady progress.)
  - flossly
    
    Linux (Linus T himself iirc) is very GPLv2.
    They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc. But the result was also that big corps liked GPLv3 even less than GPLv2.
    On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.
    
    NoidFonsense
    
    As a gplv3 advocate, I disagree. Anti-Tivoisation is thr main innovation of gplv3
    
    jraph
    
    > They are not onboard with the innovation that was GPLv3. That innovation was mostly about software patents iirc
    I think what Linus is against in the GPLv3 is mostly the anti-tivoisation mechanisms. He wants tivoisation as a feature for the Linux kernel.
    
    ender341341
    
    > On top of that it was going to be very hard (near impossible) to get all devs to agree to a v2->v3 license bump.
    My understanding was this was never a problem, almost all of the kernel was licensed as "GPL2 or newer" until GPL3 was released and they removed the "or newer" from new releases
    
    tredre3
    
    You're mistaken. Here's a direct quote from Linux Torvalds dated 2006:
    The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version" language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the actual License itself. It's part of the _explanatory_ text that talks about how to apply the license to your program, and it says that _if_ you want to accept any later versions of the GPL, you can state so in your source code. The Linux kernel has never stated that in general. Some authors have chosen to use the suggested FSF boilerplate (including the "any later version" language), but the kernel in general never has. In other words: the _default_ license strategy is always just the particular version of the GPL that accompanies a project. If you want to license a program under _any_ later version of the GPL, you have to state so explicitly. Linux never did.
    https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl.html
  - g-b-r
    
    The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?
    Or to be forced to change license to large portions of your project?
    With Linux I meant the Linux kernel
    
    iamnothere
    
    Copyright is based on laws, and laws can be changed or clarified. Given the amount of overinvestment in AI, I expect them to change. The EU is already making moves in this direction: https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expro...
    I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.
    
    g-b-r
    
    It could be, but:
    - For now the laws are in force, and I don't even know of discussions to change them (that EU proposal only wants to allow training on personal data)
    - changing intellectual property rights law would typically require changing international treaties
    - however much companies are in love with AI now, I'm not sure they'd support abolishing legal protections on which their business relies
    
    ethin
    
    > The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?
    The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.
    
    g-b-r
    
    Of course we're talking of code for which that's implausible.
    I think in most cases twenty lines of identical code are more than enough for that to be the case (at least if it contains a few non-single-letter identifiers).
    
    ethin
    
    I mean, if it uses the exact same identifiers and maybe even comments, then sure, that's pretty good evidence. However, 99.99999999999 percent of the time this will not be the case. As in, the super-super-super-majority of LLM-generated code is customized for the specific use case it's being employed in. As such, claiming any kind of infringement, let alone proving it, will be insanely difficult.
    
    g-b-r
    
    We're talking of the case when it happens (and it's detected).
    I don't know if that's in the 0.000000000001 percent of the time, but it can happen.
    
    Vaushite
    
    You're being pretty, I'm not sure the right word, scaredycat?, about licensing. Licensing doesn't matter unless somebody sues you, which they won't in most cases. The AI era has exposed this truth that you're extremely unlikely to get sued about copyright violation - so unless you're the kind of person who avoids car trips because you could crash, you can ignore it.
    
    g-b-r
    
    Uhm, you're being pretty, careless?
    I'm not sure that that's how legal departments think.
    
    jeremyjh
    
    Legal departments definitely think about their practical exposure. That is because they are employed by businesses.
    
    graemep
    
    How many cases of an LLM outputting training code have you heard of? let alone training code that you are not allowed to use or relicense?
    Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?
    
    mschuster91
    
    > Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?
    Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.
    And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.
    
    graemep
    
    On the other hand it could be very expensive if caught. It could be very difficult to remove the code too.
    Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.
    I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.
    
    g-b-r
    
    I heard many cases of LLMs outputting their training data verbatim; they sure don't check that such data can be legally used by you before doing it.
    As others said, for closed source software it's a lot harder to detect plagiarism.
    And it's in general very hard to detect plagiarized code; there's some product that does it, but it of course has only a partial inventory of the existing open-source code.
    I think that some big company does use those products, though.
    
    graemep
    
    > I heard many cases of LLMs outputting their training data verbatim;
    I have heard of this happening in response to prompts designed to do so, not inadvertently.
    How many case of proprietary code inadvertently being included in open source projects, or even of copyleft code being included in permissively licensed projects do you know of?
    I can just imagine it happening to a purely vibe coded project that lets an LLM do huge chunks of stuff with minimal instructions doing something like copying a chunk of a library, but its otherwise hard to just copy code that will work in a different context.
    We read of huge LLM assisted projects on HN all the time. How many of those have been sued?
    
    ltph0
    
    They did in 2023 and the AI thieves built logic to rephrase the plagiarism so it isn't immediately detectable.
    Proprietary developers don't care because their code wasn't trained on. Is that a trick question?
    They do care now that reverse engineering is possible.
    
    graemep
    
    Can you explain further? What was the code affected?
  - asveikau
    
    I think what you're finding is that people who don't care about low quality of LLM outputs also don't care about licensing. If you're in the faction that supports all of this, you don't see a lot of people around you still caring about licensing or quality.
    
    iamnothere
    
    I am in neither faction, as I already indicated. I’m not an LLM user except for search engine summaries.
    I also already mentioned that some formerly GPL die-hards have been jumping ship from Linux to BSDs simply because of the respective stances on AI. That’s enough for me to say this works both ways.
- soperj
  > Linux, for one, for what I can tell never cared too much about the GPL.
  The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL. MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.
  - craftkiller
    
    > no contributions
    That's just obviously not true. Check out the commit history on FreeBSD and look at all the contributions from Netflix. Off the top of my head they contributed kTLS and asynchronous sendfile which made it such that a single syscall could send the full contents of a file over a socket even with TLS.
    Grepping through the git logs for the "Sponsored by" lines shows these top results:
    15925 The FreeBSD Foundation 3738 Netflix 2084 EMC / Isilon Storage Division 1922 Rubicon Communications, LLC ("Netgate") 1733 Dell EMC Isilon 1550 Chelsio Communications 1446 DARPA, AFRL 1421 Mellanox Technologies 1262 Klara, Inc. 784 Arm Ltd 729 iXsystems, Inc. 707 Solarflare Communications, Inc. 552 Netflix, Inc. 477 Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG 473 Microsoft 421 Juniper Networks, Inc. 411 DARPA, NAI Labs 386 Stormshield 385 Microsoft OSTC 384 DARPA 375 NetApp, Inc. 358 Innovate UK 355 DARPA, Network Associates Laboratories 317 Yandex LLC 299 NVIDIA Networking
    One company that isn't in that list but shows up as an author is Datto which gave us native encryption on ZFS (shout out to Tom for writing that!)
    
    akimbostrawman
    
    These are pitiful amounts of changes. Sonys closed sourced PlayStation changes would dwarf these numbers.
    
    kevinrineer
    
    So interesting to see Darpa represented in different labs. I wouldn't have bother to look for that interesting tidbit otherwise, so thanks for that.
    
    Brian_K_White
    
    The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.
    If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
    What are the equivalent numbers for everything that was ever licenced GPL vs MIT? Neither of us knows but I defy you to even slightly attempt to hint that the world did not benefit from gpl code about a million times more than mit code as a direct result of their fundamental natures.
    
    craftkiller
    
    The assertion I was addressing is that copyfree code "just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions".
    My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.
    Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.
    > If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.
    I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    
    Brian_K_White
    
    It did not prove any such thing except in the meaningless pedantic technicality way. No reasonably rational person read that comment and thought they meant literally 100% not a single example. The existence of exceptions does not disprove anything. Everything has exceptions.
    Numbers prove or disprove it. Which neither of us has. The fact that everything you showed even fits in a little comment like that compared to the scope of all software actually proves what a joke it was to even try to present this as any sort of argument.
    "why do you keep saying MIT?" Oh FFS really? MIT, or BSD, is perfectly understandable shorthand for any of the mit/bsd/x11/etc in a general discussion like this. They are all of a class. How do you know? Because no one has attempted to discuss any fine points here that would make any of those any different from any of the others. You have to go out of your way to say they are different, and then cannot say in what way that matters or changes anything. So why do you yet again pretend an insignificant detail in any way affects the thrust of the argument?
    Go ahead and substitute "MIT" with "BSD" or any of the specific "various BSD licences". Ok now that you did that, what changed? The argument was valid or invalid before, and the opposite now?
    
    craftkiller
    
    So far I'm the only one here who has provided any numbers. All you and soperj have provided are unsubstantiated claims. Why don't you do some analysis on the "scope of all software" and get back to me? Given the scale, I imagine it will take you at least a couple of years.
    
    bigstrat2003
    
    > The existence of exceptions does not disprove anything. Everything has exceptions.
    It does when the original claim was an absolute one. That's how logic works.
    
    bigstrat2003
    
    > The existence of some contributions to MIT code does not disprove the assertion.
    Yes it does. The assertion was:
    > MIT licensed stuff(if it's any good) just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions.
    Therefore, any number of contributions disprove the assertion.
  - tehologist
    
    Linux success has nothing to do with GPL and everything to do with a lawsuit and timing. Linus himself said if it wasn't for the lawsuit Linux probably would not exist.
    
    MaxBarraclough
    
    > Linux success has nothing to do with GPL
    Linus doesn't agree. He once said in an interview that making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did, [0] and has said that I love GPLv2. I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back. [1]
    [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http:/www.tlug.jp...
    [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvaldss-love-hate-rela...
    
    spauldo
    
    Both can be true, you know.
    
    MaxBarraclough
    
    They cannot. Linux success has nothing to do with GPL is in direct contradiction with I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux.
  - bch
    
    > The reason that Linux actually succeeded where BSD didn't is because of the GPL.
    Linux succeeded where BSD was tied-up in a lawsuit[0] from AT&T and the fear of “picking the wrong horse” w BSD under threat allowed Linux to slide into public consciousness and installs.
    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
  - riffraff
    
    If that was the case, we wouldn't be using openssh, openssl, perl/python/ruby etc...
    I'm a GPL person but that's not why Linux won over the BSDs.
  - tehologist
    
    Also why did you mention MIT licensed, it is obviously BSD licensed.
  - iamnothere
    
    BSD was tied up in lawsuits for years, giving Linux a head start.
  - spauldo
    
    Sure, and USL vs BSDI had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
    Seriously, if you like the GPL, use arguments that are verifiably true. Otherwise you're just another fanboy spouting talking points.
- palata
  Interestingly, Linux is GPLv2 and NetBSD is permissive, so I assume AlpineBSD is permissive as well?
  - jraph
    
    Linux being GPL doesn't matter here because it's not used in AlpineBSD.
- [deleted]
  Comment removed.
  - g-b-r
    
    I'll flag yours, because it was a completely senseless flagging.
    It wasn't even a discussion about that, I wonder if you read the two lines of the comment.
lionkor
> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars
It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?
It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.
- mrbn100ful
  Most of what you use is built by "code monkeys" and is on the way to being vibe coded.
  - 0c3ca83
    
    Yeah. We noticed. We've been complaining about the quality for a while.
- iamnothere
  
  I wasn’t referring to the specifics of the disagreement, I meant the level of vitriol.
- Revanche1367
  Except in this case the monkeys are pretty good at coding as long as you have enough bananas (tokens). They can follow directions pretty accurately and work independently for at least short periods and incrementally test the work even if you’re not present onsite monkey-handling all the time. I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue. If and when nearly the entire professional industry changes to LLM-based code in most cases, what are they going to do to find those relatively few people who are still willing to write everything manually and spend their spare time maintaining these projects?
  - officeplant
    
    >I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue.
    plagiarism machine can not be trusted.
    therefore plagiarism machine must not be allowed to make decisions.
    
    da_chicken
    
    Especially when it's the corporate plagiarism machine owned by the amoral billionaire class that is profiting wildly off the well-paid legislature's shocking sudden disinterest in protecting the rights and privacy of the people after the capture of the first, second, and third branches alongside the fourth estate.
    People are tired of exploding costs, loss of privacy, intrusive technology, pervasive advertising, malignant anti-intellectualism, endless rent-seeking products, and fascist leadership. Adding economic crisis from job loss is a fast track to violence.
    I use AI and see it's value and even I'm furious about how it's going.
  - iamnothere
    
    Perhaps one day we’ll finally understand the value of simpler software that moves ever-closer to “complete” (simple maintenance only), rather than constantly reinventing Zawinsky’s Law.
    It’s ok for software to be replaced when something better comes along for a new generation, but what I wouldn’t give for more well-maintained tools that are feature complete.
    What is the modern version of Zawinsky’s Law, anyway? Every program expands until it contains a web browser (Electron), notifications, and a chatbot?
  - bigstrat2003
    
    Except none of that is actually true. LLMs suck at programming, and the level of effort you have to put in to police their suck is so great that you may as well have just written it yourself.

kev009

These types of projects tend to have a flash of appeal, especially to people used to Linux, because it lessens one degree of unfamiliarity, but they don't seem to stick around for to me obvious reasons.

It's hard to get involved with something like a BSD project because you have to learn a lot and put in enough effort to get committer rights. And then if you want to move the needle you have to do even more work and build consensus without getting overly emotional when people disagree with you. But it is the path I would recommend to have a lasting impact, and I am speaking from experience as a FreeBSD and NetBSD src committer.

Also, pkgsrc is one of the strong points of NetBSD, coupled with pbulk and pkgin. Wrapping that all up in an opinionated installation (like Omarchy recently did to Arch) would be a more survivable effort. But as my friend Larry McVoy would say, it means you don't always get to drive the big red fire truck by yourself.

spijdar
The BSDs do have comparatively miserable contributor experiences, though I understand why. At least from my very, very limited exposure.
Several years ago now, I ran into a problem with playing audio on NetBSD/sparc. I had an RDI PowerLite laptop, which is 80% of a SPARCstation 5 clone stuffed into a laptop chassis. Part of the 20% different was the audio chip, which was the same AMD ISDN chip used in the SPARCstation 1/2, doing mu-law audio.
Whenever I'd play audio, the laptop would instantly reset. Huh. That's weird. I ended up figuring out that someone had recently massively overhauled the audio driver subsystem in the kernel, and basically the relevant audio driver was missing some mutex operation, and an assert() was panic'ing the kernel.
For a non SMP system, the lock wasn't necessary (IIRC) but the new code was being more rigorous and causing a kernel panic.
The patch was pretty easy, just adding a few locks/unlocks. But I could never figure out what I was supposed to do with the patch after.
I'm probably just stupid. I don't want to imply there's no path to do this, I just never figured it out. I didn't try for long either, since getting 8-bit mu law audio working was just something goofy I was doing for fun.
But for comparison, when I found a bug in the signal handler for 32-bit PowerPC, my memory was that it was pretty straightforward to produce a patch: find the relevant maintainer, open a dialogue, and eventually submit a patch: https://marc.info/?l=linuxppc-embedded&m=160963760120837
Neither fix was ultimately very important, and neither would have impacted more than a couple dozen people on the entire planet. But Linux got a patch, while NetBSD didn't...
- 0c3ca83
  
  > But I could never figure out what I was supposed to do with the patch after.
  Send an email to the dev list with a patch. Same as Linux, Git itself, and a lot of other projects.
- kev009
  These days there are too many choices for FreeBSD, you can submit a GitHub PR, Phorge PR, Bugzilla patch, Phabricator patch, mailing list patch... sharing the code is not the hard part. For NetBSD, a Gnats PR and/or mailing list comment with a patch or link is still the way.
  Getting a person's attention who can and will do something is still challenging if you don't know whom, which is the same problem I saw sending patches to Linux mailing lists which went unanswered, and was given no specific feedback or path forward privately contacting the corporate maintainers.
  - spijdar
    
    Yeah, I probably put too much weight on my anecdote. I didn't try looking for very long at all, and the case of Linux was made easier by the code being part of a small bundle of patches made by a couple of people, and the fact that Michael Ellerman was really nice, communicative on IRC, and accommodating to a very niche and bizarre set of patches.
- officeplant
  >I had an RDI PowerLite laptop
  Just out of curiosity, why the Sparc laptop? While I'd love to find one today to tinker with, I assume anyone who had one back then was mainly working on sun machine's / unix and needed some at home familiarity.
  - spijdar
    
    I bought mine back in 2019, when I was ... 22. I was going through my "I want a real UNIX machine!" phase, and that's why I went through the motions of trying to make NetBSD "genuinely usable" on it.
    Nowadays it runs SunOS 4.1 with a port of KDE 1 on it, and netboots Sprite for fun.
    Of course, after porting the Sprite kernel to said laptop, I learned why the Linux kernel is littered with comments like this, and why it was never quite the beautiful, elegant, UNIX :tm: machine I imagined it was.
    /* * Are you now convinced that the Swift is one of the * biggest VLSI abortions of all time? Bravo Fujitsu! * Fujitsu, the !#?!%$'d up processor people. I bet if * you examined the microcode of the Swift you'd find * XXX's all over the place. */
    Or, maybe, it was even more UNIX-y than I had thought. :-)
    (of course, the laptop itself is lovely -- the plastic shell has a nice rounded edge for your wrists, and the keyboard uses proper mechanical switches that feel much nicer than actual Sun keyboards of that era)
    
    officeplant
    
    Ahh a modern purchase! I get temptations every time I've seen a sparc powered laptop end up on Ebay, but never for a low enough price to justify the the tinkering urges.
officeplant
> Wrapping that all up in an opinionated installation (like Omarchy recently did to Arch) would be a more survivable effort.
Well we currently have fallout in FreeBSD land because of Jordan Hubbard slopping together Daemonarchy.
Going about as well as you expect when you even loosely tie yourself to a crazy white nationalist like DHH. Even in what is barely a reference to his slop dotfiles masquerading as a distro.
- hobo123
  As DHH is a Danish guy partly or mostly living in the US, it would be interesting to know this nationalist's view of the whole Greenland thing.
  - lioeters
    
    Most residents of Greenland are indigenous Inuits. A boot-licking fascist would be happy to betray his own country and support selling off the territory.

yjftsjthsd-h

> AlpineBSD is not a fork of Alpine Linux, its package collection is original (though many packages are ultimately based on aports).

> Alpine Linux uses the OpenRC init system. Currently, AlpineBSD uses s6 and we intend to add OpenRC as an alternative.

I'm not sure where exactly the line should be, but that feels like it's not an Alpine* then. Like, if you're starting your package collection separately and use a different service manager, you're further from Alpine Linux than Adélie Linux is.

(To be clear, I'm a big fan of making a new OS from a *BSD core and a new userspace. I'm just quibbling about naming semantics)

SwellJoe

I don't like it when unrelated projects squat on the name of some existing project. Trademark isn't just a commercially useful thing, it helps users understand what they're getting and who they're getting it from.
It's shitty for a new project to ride on the coattails of a trusted project with years of reputation. It misleads and confuses folks.
Take inspiration anywhere you like, borrow the code all you like, but don't steal the damned name.

efficax

Ok so it's "AI free". But why? It doesn't justify the decision but just assumes you will understand the reasoning. I have to say: I don't. For example they are pinning binutils, gcc, and gdb to the last version they know does not have LLM generated code. I assume this means they will not be able to accept any upstream patches, but instead have to take over maintenance of those packages themselves for the forseeable future, effectively meaning development on those will stop for the purposes of AlpineBSD. Seems stupid, to me.

myaccountonhn

I suspect the reasoning is very similar to why Sourcehut recently did a ToS change prohibiting AI
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/
cryptonector
It's a losing battle. Give it time and this attitude will go away by the sheer weight of AI-coded open source they really cannot say no to just because there is no human-coded alternative available that is good enough.
- RunSet
  
  Yes, yes; victory is assured. the sheer weight of the slop will inevitably crush the human spirit. That is, I presume, why it is necessary to force it everywhere it will fit.

hoppp

The whole "as little AI code as possible" is tribalism.

I want software that is brilliant and well audited, no matter who or what produced it.

No AI guarantees nothing, especially if it's a C codebase like netbsd, why not also join the rust tribe then?

canelonesdeverd
What makes their position tribialism and not yours?
- hoppp
  I think rational tool use doesn't have to be tribalist. Right tool for the right job.
  It becomes tribalism when there is an enemy. Us and them, mac vs pc, AI vs Humans, the left vs the right.
  - boomlinde
    
    Who is the enemy they've made here?
  - tintor
    
    Maintainers get their FOSS projects bombed with AI slop PRs and issues, and you call their position to not accept slop a tribalist position?
    
    gucci-on-fleek
    
    I'm not the OP, but I would personally say that not wanting to work with LLM-generated output (including that submitted via PRs and issues) is reasonable, but not wanting to use LLM-generated code from well-regarded established projects (not vibe-coded slop) is veering closer to tribalism.
    Because to me, it's entirely fair to care about the process when you're the one working with it, but if you've never looked at the code and it works well, it seems odd to care how 10% of it was produced.
    I still wouldn't quite use the loaded "tribalism" term here myself though, because there are still a few valid reasons to be skeptical of LLM-generated code, but for many people, their hard anti-LLM stance appears to be more of a shibboleth than a principled stance from my perspective.
    
    ragall
    
    > it seems odd to care how 10% of it was produced
    To me, it seems odd not to care.
    
    gucci-on-fleek
    
    > To me, it seems odd not to care.
    If you don't mind me asking, why do you think that? I'm not trying to start a debate, and I'm sympathetic to many of the reasons why some people are against LLMs (the environment, copyright issues, loss of jobs, not liking chatbots, not trusting the current companies, etc.), but I'm curious why you are against them.
    (I don't really understand one being so against LLMs that one tries to avoid software that contains even small amounts of LLM-written code, but I know that a lot of well-informed people feel this way, and it seems far more likely that I'm the one missing something rather than everyone else being wrong.)
    
    ragall
    
    For the same reason why I try to avoid work done by slaves, for example Chinese solar panels manufactured in Xinjiang concentration camps. They're repugnant at origin.
    
    petesergeant
    
    > Maintainers get their FOSS projects bombed with AI slop PRs and issues, and you call their position to not accept slop a tribalist
    Sure, and that's the motte.
    This is a direct quote from the linked website:
    > Any software whose code, documentation, binaries, or other assets include, in any part, the output of a generative AI tool such as an LLM, is considered “tainted” for our purposes.
    ... and that's the bailey.
- cryptonector
  Pragmatism is the opposite of tribalism. GP is a pragmatist, therefore not a tribalist.
  - hoppp
    
    Tribalism ↔ Pragmatism: prioritising group loyalty and identity versus prioritising practical outcomes and what works.
    I think saying "all code that was touched by an LLM is tainted" is not pragmatic.
autuni
I think most people see the issue there with the "well audited" part. You didn't know which developers just copy pasted stack overflow code together before either, but the rate at which that code came in was manageable for reviews, and supplementing reviews with AI doesn't really lower the concern for people concerned about the quality of the code.
The alternative would be to rely on self-policing, which is a bad idea. Not even because you can't trust people to not be lazy, but simply because there's also actively bad actors involved.
If the code is well reviewed/audited, of course it doesn't really matter or not if it was hand-typed or generated, it's (at least for me) more of a question on how to manage quality control.
- pantalaimon
  
  But AI is much better at finding bugs during code review than humans, we've seen that demonstrated very publicly.
flossly
It's more like the Amish not using certain technology we all take for granted.
I see this much broader: opting out of certain technologies.
As a vegan I opt out of all animal domestication/husbandry and wild catch/hunt.
And I try to stay away from refined sugar and refined starches.
Abortion is also a technology people feel strongly about.
And now we have the use of AI.
Did we also have people that did not want to use an electronic calculator when it just came out? Probably.
- slfnflctd
  
  You haven't earned the right to use an electronic calculator until you first master the slide rule!
vaylian
> I want software that is brilliant and well audited, no matter who or what produced it.
Not caring about ethics is selfish.
- josteink
  What ethics?
  You seem to hold a position which for you is self evident, but obviously not others.
  Care to explain?
  - vaylian
    
    AI causes massive environmental harm in a time where ecosystems and the climate are already under severe stress.
    We also see a lot of AI-based pull requests to open source projects that completely overwhelm maintainers. Bug bounty programs have already been canceled to remove the incentive to bombard maintainers with alleged security issues. AI is harmful for small libre and open source projects.
    AI is forced on people because of capitalist incentives. People who care about their craft are labeled as old-fashioned, because they do not like to use AI. Even if the end product (the software) is as good as the GGP comment wishes, the way the software was produced might have been a very joyless process, because AI was doing all the fun work.
    AI in programming also leads to deskilling and makes it less likely that junior programmers become as good as the current senior programmers. This might lead to a software quality crisis in the future. And in the meantime AIs will run dry of new high-quality learning material.
    Free software licenses are based on copyright. These licenses are supposed to protect the freedoms of the end user (because that's the ethical thing to do). However, the situation with AI-generated output and copyright is far from clear: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/supreme-court-denies-art... AI-contributions to software projects might be incompatible with the license of that project, because the contributor does not have the necessary rights to the contribution.
    edit: And AI can do shady things that we shouldn't normalise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50284255
    
    josteink
    
    > AI causes massive environmental harm in a time where ecosystems and the climate are already under severe stress
    One could also argue this is a temporary condition - driving the world to better, more efficient power-supplies in the long term (like nuclear).
    It also allows engineers to more quickly arrive at efficient solutions for their problems - enabling more efficient systems being deployed earlier - possibly saving energy in the long run.
    I don't think this is as clear cut yet as some people make it out to be.
    > We also see a lot of AI-based pull requests to open source projects that completely overwhelm maintainers.
    I agree this is a negative. Open-source maintainers have limited capacity to follow up work - and externally AI-generated PRs only make this problem worse.
    > AI is harmful for small libre and open source projects.
    Not if the projects themselves decides to use AI to more quickly diagnose bugs - and fix issues or features they want to implement. There are several OSS projects which are going this route, to the point that they don't want PRs. Instead they want bug-reports which are accurate enough for an LLM to create the PR for them, in accordance with the projects coding and process standards.
    How is this harmful?
    > AI is forced on people because of capitalist incentives
    This sounds like a very weak argument.
    Everything in a capitalist society is imposed on people based on capitalist incentives. That's how and why capitalism works (compared to other, lesser successful models).
    Why should AI be treated differently?
    > People who care about their craft are labeled as old-fashioned
    Not really. Develop what you like, how like!
    But people who see AI as the big-bad-wolf and go on a war-path against it, are being labeled old-fashioned yes. Same as people who were fighting against IDEs, linters, type-checks, compilers, etc.
    > the way the software was produced might have been a very joyless process, because AI was doing all the fun work.
    Some people find craft at a higher level - creating a specification for what would be the perfect piece of software.
    And with AI, they can use that spec to magically materialize real working software from that.
    That brings me REAL joy - even as a software craftsman.
    > AI in programming also leads to deskilling and makes it less likely that junior programmers become as good as the current senior programmers
    This is true.
    Also: My predecessors were probably better at fixing their car should it break down than I am. Despite that society seems to have moved on.
    > And in the meantime AIs will run dry of new high-quality learning material.
    This is a real risk and a real possibility. AI going brain-damaged over training or "reproducing" on its own generated output. Digital incest.
    But it's not a proven outcome yet either.
    But in a capitalist society - we'll choose the model which works best - and this should self regulate.
    > Free software licenses are based on copyright. These licenses are supposed to protect the freedoms of the end user (because that's the ethical thing to do).
    Software licensning has long been impossible to enforce.
    If somebody copies GPLed code to stack overflow without the license - what means do we have to prevent people from using that in closed-source products, or permissively licensed OSS projects?
    AI doesn't solve this at all - it just makes the impossibility obvious to all.
    One could argue this is a net benefit (a reality check - over idealism) or a problem. I see both cases.
    > AI-contributions to software projects might be incompatible with the license of that project
    So could any non-AI contribution as well. See above.
    In short - I don't find your argument convincing, but at least I can see what angle you are coming from. Thanks for taking the time to answer at thoroughly.
123ajhz
The AI tribe backed by $billions of influencer money calls others "tribal".
Can the AI people even devise an original argument by themselves or do they always just plagiarize and flip them?
- sleepycatgirl
  sometimes, it feels like AI people are incapable of understanding that the concerns we have with this can encompass more than purely productivity and convenience :/
  - vconnor
    
    Haven’t you heard? Having no morals or sense of ethics is called being ‘pragmatic’
- lproven
  
  > just plagiarize and flip them
  FWIW this is a common human tactic in general. It's called DARVO.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
  I note, neutrally, that it is typically a pattern seen in cases of abusive relationships.
  Me personally, I see it a lot when confronting anthropogenic global warming deniers. They tend to hysterically shriek at me that I am a conspiracy theorist, science denier, etc. when of course the truth is that climate denialism is a conspiracy theory, as realistic as Flat Earthers and Young Earth Creationists.
- surajrmal
  Look, I'm not an AI supporter, but you can't put your head in the sand about things it does well. Even if you don't use it to produce production code, using it for research, prototyping, etc is still incredibly useful.
  - officeplant
    
    Alternatively
    >Look I'm not an anti-AI supporter, but you can't put your head in the sand about the environmental and social destruction it causes. Even if you use it to do good it's still incredibly harmful.
    We aren't putting our heads in the sand, we're objecting to increasingly frantic pushes on a global scale to force this shit on us all. We're doing harm reduction on every front we can from personal lives to software.
  - cvbakj
    
    This thread is specifically about "as little AI code as possible". And you use the "head in the sand" platitude about other uses of AI!
    Can AI people even think any longer? You can peck on the downvote button like a hen, that's it.
bigstrat2003

> No AI guarantees nothing
No, but it does significantly increase the likelihood that the software will be good. Stuff people wrote with LLMs is on average much worse than stuff people wrote themselves.
jesterson
> I want software that is brilliant and well audited, no matter who or what produced it.
As it turns out, "AI code" is a synonym for non brilliant and non audited code.
- Ekaros
  
  I really wonder do they even audit the discussion outside their own comments. You can absolute notice how popular the option of not "auditing" code is in their AI-tribe. Best they do is have it review it or make tests... Not actually read the later either...
  And then when someone does audit the stuff output is questionable... Telling that it is most likely not that brilliant.
  I am thinking that just maybe the "load bearing" (for AI terms) components should have quite more oversight. Which might go away unless they are actually human authored...

lukaslalinsky

I was a fan of the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project, I wanted to use FreeBSD back then, but I was unhappy with the BSD approach to software packaging. But even that was abandoned due to lack of interest. People who want to use BSDs just generally prefer the BSD way of doing things. I might be wrong, but I don't think the anti-AI ex-Linux-user crowd is large enough for this to become successful. I think a more useful work from the anti-AI community would be to start improving the driver situation in NetBSD/OpenBSD, so it can be used on modern machines, and just accept the BSD way of packaging software.

seethishat

Back in my day, we didn't have artificial intelligence. We had actual ignorance. And we liked it that way.

lproven
For those who won't notice, this is a gag from the OpenBSD 8.0 release song.
- sscaryterry
  
  Love OpenBSD, but the song thing is creepy.

thenthenthen

Alpine is also the codename of the first iOS, hence the default root pwd ‘alpine’. https://mashable.com/archive/apple-ios-codenames#9.CLuUuywuq...

cturner

After reading the web page, I am left with some questions unanswered,

* Is it a goal for AlpineBSD to run on native hardware, or is it intended for containers (a major use-case for Alpine itself)?

* For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?

If the team want to attract interest, they should give more context.

The mission is unclear. The team could address this by stating goals and milestones on the front page.

There is a link to a tool s6 on the page. The description of that tool opens with a circular definition. It would be clearer if it stated why it exists in the opening paragraph. Near the bottom it talks about "One of the design goals of s6-frontend". It would be better to state all of the design goals.

gabrielgio
Alpine is really nice host OS for daily drive. Simple and small. Given that Drew is leading it my guess would be it is meant for native hardware.
> For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?
Alpine userland is nice.
- RetroTechie
  > Alpine userland is nice
  NetBSD userland is not?
  - lproven
    
    > NetBSD userland is not?
    Honestly, no.
    I just reviewed version 11. It's a pain to install, a pain to configure, a pain to add a proper desktop, etc. If you do manage to install a desktop environment, the ones in the NetBSD repos are mostly long out of date.
    https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/20/netbsd-1...
    The community is great. The mailing list tried very hard to help me to install and run CDE.
    After 3 days of trying, I gave up. For reference, this was my 2nd or 3rd try.
    No, the NetBSD userland is not good, and the docs are not great either. There are an absolute tonne of implicit assumptions of knowledge that newcomers won't have.
    An example:
    https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html
    The recommended way is "boot from install medium, install over the top". Note that the handbook does not actually say this, and goes on to detail an alternative method called "sysupgrade" which looks much like the OpenBSD method and resembles conventional Linux system upgrade methods.
    So I tried that. It irretrievably destroyed my only bare metal install.
    To forestall an inevitable comment: it's a testbed, so no, I did not have any backups. It contains -- well, contained -- no data at all.
    
    JdeBP
    
    I was wondering whether the Guide pointed to the actual doco. The Guide is not perfect. I had not yet checked. (NetBSD has a Guide; FreeBSD has a Handbook; OpenBSD has a FAQ. One of the reasons for keeping the names straight is that there is something else called by its authors the OpenBSD Handbook, which is not produced by the OpenBSD people, and is a perennial thorn in their sides when people come to them with "I read in your Handbook that …" problems.)
    Reading that chapter, it turns out that it does. Maybe it should stress the point more, but the actual doco is the likes of these:
    * https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/evbarm-aarch64...
    * https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/i386/INSTALL.h...
    * https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amd64/INSTALL....
    * https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amiga/INSTALL....
    * https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/sparc64/INSTAL...
    … and so forth. Plus the manual pages for postinstall(8) and the like.
    
    rjsw
    
    You wasted a fair bit of people's time trying and failing to get any information out of you about what you had done [1].
    Your "irretrievably destroyed" system was always recoverable.
    [1] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2026/08/18/msg034...
    
    tosti
    
    IDK what went wrong. Last time I installed netBSD (a year ago or so), it was a breeze. I loved it and the manual pages were top notch. It felt like what Debian could've been if systemd didn't exist.
    The first time I installed netBSD was almost 20 years ago and it worked even back then, but it was rather limited. IIRC they were (one of) the first to have Xen, that was pretty cool imho.
ibn_khaldun
> * For users who want to avoid AI-generated code, why run this rather than netbsd itself?
To start a community.
- yjftsjthsd-h
  But the NetBSD community already exists?
  - ibn_khaldun
    
    It's apparent that AlpineBSD is meant to support some idiosyncrasies that NetBSD isn't guaranteed to accommodate.

irusensei

I've ctrl+f nanobsd but found no entires. Nanobsd is a set of build scripts from the FreeBSD source code that allows you to create a very minimal barebones operating system image. I think its mainly used for FreeBSD derivatives.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/nanobsd/

rbanffy

> The NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support, much less so than Linux.

On the other hand, it can run on a toaster, a 386, an IBM Workpad laptop…

against_epistem

I can respect this. Looks like AI auditing code is fine and I can't imagine why auditing would ever be a con. As for the lack of reasons given I guess they leave that for the users which seems completely fine to me. If you are chimping out over not getting a justification then you should probably do some soul-searching.

asmnzxklopqw

The half-life of these projects are well below one year.

bityard

> NOTICE: The NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support, much less so than Linux. You cannot necessarily expect AlpineBSD to work on any random computer you have lying around.

Huh. I feel like the author has their BSDs mixed up! NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything, even lots of platforms no longer supported by mainstream Linux distributions. The page links to the laptop wiki, which is about AMD64 laptops and their finicky peripherals and driver support. A better place to start for hardware support is https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/.

osmsucks
> NetBSD's main claim to fame is that it runs on practically everything
That means available number of architectures. NetBSD still support some pretty esoteric stuff, but though I haven't actually counted I would expect Linux to run on a comparable number of architectures.
Now, the kernel will probably boot successfully on a given machine, but whether hardware (i.e. driver) support will be decent enough for everyday use is a completely different matter! For example, NetBSD "works" on this laptop of mine... except for Ethernet card, Wi-Fi card, touchpad, ACPI suspension, external monitors via the docking station, ... :)
I'm trying (for fun) to bridge some of these gaps, but you can see how this isn't appealing to the average user.
- JdeBP
  
  If those are Elantech or Synaptics touchpads, then this is the bug report to get behind:
  * https://gnats.netbsd.org/60897
  I think that it is specifically the interaction between ihidev and ACPI. The hardware devices themselves are PS/2, with a vendor-specific extension to PS/2 activated by a special handshake, plus I2C. (On machines from 2024 that come with 9 USB root hubs; such is the inertia of laptop design.)
CodeCompost

The impression I get is that NetBSD has just enough code to get it up and running on a machine but there is not enough development and testing to get it to run well on a machine.
rjsw

As a NetBSD developer, I wouldn't claim that it works on everything.
wrxd

Depends on what you mean with "it runs". Does it boot? Probably. Can you use your WiFi adapter or graphics card? Probably not
sspiff

That was true 20 years ago, but not really today. Today's hardware is much more complicated and I wouldn't expect NetBSD to work well on anything but the most basic hardware.
ranger_danger
"runs on practically everything" I take to mean the main CPU and general machine architecture, not every possible peripheral driver one might need.
- whalesalad
  yeah. it'll boot. want wifi? you need a virtual machine running linux to contain the driver lol
  - lproven
    
    That, to be fair, was FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD Foundation has spent a lot of money in the last couple of years on improving Wifi, drivers, power management, etc. in what it terms the "laptop project".

tosti

    > more GNU-oriented userspace, preferring e.g. GNU make over BSD make

How are you going to build that kernel?

commandersaki

I'm sure we'll make a fuss about this today, but we won't hear about this project again for at least 10 years.

Gualdrapo

I so wish Gentoo/BSD still was a thing.

craftkiller

One thing I'm cautiously watching is NixBSD. With nix you can trivially compile all your software from source and modify it (both of which I do on the Linux-based NixOS). So I think that would cover the main selling point of Gentoo, though naturally it adds the Nix layer that you may either love or hate. The only reason I haven't dived into it yet is my FreeBSD machines are all foundational parts of my infrastructure so I don't want to take a gamble on such a young project. So for now I just load it up into a virtual machine and poke at it longingly from time to time.
https://github.com/nix-community/nixbsd
ocd

I never got the chance to try it, but yeah. I've looked at the Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gentoo/OpenBSD pages a few times just yearning to try them. Portage and all other Gentoo tools being a fairly kernel agnostic toolkit is just the coolest. Even though OpenBSD and NetBSD are in my favorites with Gentoo and Void Linux, I don't think I could ever primarily use anything else unless it had Portage. This rising BSD popularity is welcome news for anyone leaning more UNIX among Linux users.

scheme271

It's funny how there's a disclaimer about not supporting as much hardware as Linux. NetBSD had a reputation for supporting pretty much everything so seeing the tables turn in favor of Linux is pretty odd.

craftkiller

Neat project. One thing I don't see covered: is everything going to be statically linked like it is on Alpine Linux? Is statically linking libc advisable on a NetBSD kernel? I know (unlike Linux) the FreeBSD kernel ABI can change every major release, but I'm not familiar with NetBSD's approach.

Intralexical
Alpine Linux is not statically linked. It provides a musl environment which makes it easy to statically link your own builds, but software shipped as part of the distro is usually dynamically linked.
```
  $ docker run -it --rm alpine

  / # apk add cmd:ldd
  / # ldd $(which ash)
          /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7f4cb4d1d000)
          libc.musl-x86_64.so.1 => /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7f4cb4d1d000)

  / # apk add cmd:python3
  / # ldd $(which python3)
          /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7fd630cab000)
          libpython3.12.so.1.0 => /usr/lib/libpython3.12.so.1.0 (0x7fd63069a000)
          libc.musl-x86_64.so.1 => /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 (0x7fd630cab000)
```
- craftkiller
  Woah, TIL! My Alpine Linux world view has just been shattered. Static linking was frankly *the* selling point of Alpine Linux for me and it turns out I was just plain wrong.
  - 0x457
    
    Alpine selling point was that it's small, which was selling people only for people that either don't understand docker layers or can't make Dockerfile correctly.
    Alpine’s connection to static linking is mainly that it provides a convenient musl build environment. A fully static binary can run in `FROM scratch`.
    
    craftkiller
    
    > A fully static binary can run in `FROM scratch`.
    Not just `FROM scratch` but also in other contexts. For example:
    I wrote my own password manager which lives on a USB drive. Since I compiled a static binary, I can execute it on any Linux machine.
    Running static binaries in FreeBSD's Linuxulator is easier. The Linuxulator is a separate set of syscalls that get used when you attempt to run a Linux binary, so a static binary will "just work" for the most part (unless the program needs special filesystems like /proc or /sys). A dynamically linked binary means I need to make sure I have any necessary Linux libraries in the proper location and the Linuxulator's `ld` working properly. Updates to these libraries can then make something that used to work, suddenly stop working. Certainly not an insurmountable task, but there's so many fewer places where things can break when you're just running a static binary.
    
    0x457
    
    Well, `FROM scratch` implies that if there is something that works with linux syscalls (i.e. Linuxulator) then it generally runs. Unless, like you said, it needs special filesystems.
    
    yjftsjthsd-h
    
    > which was selling people only for people that either don't understand docker layers or can't make Dockerfile correctly.
    I don't think that's fair. Alpine-derived images are generally smaller, all things held equal. Of course if you do everything else right then it will matter less, but a proper multistage Dockerfile should still be smaller than the same thing built out of another distro (most of the time).
    
    zbentley
    
    > which was selling people only for people that either don't understand docker layers or can't make Dockerfile correctly.
    ...or people who had a test/deploy/debug cycle on environments that necessarily had no layer cache (ephemeral VMs, one-shot kubernetes clusters, OpenWRT routers that lost the layer cache on reboot). Or people with network-constrained traffic from registries or mirrors thereof.
    Or people in environments that took container security findings (perhaps too) seriously and were tired of triaging endless reports for random dependencies in "FROM ubuntu" containers, and wanted a default required-by-policy base image that didn't come with the world.
    Or people who needed a relatively full-featured build environment against musl without having to do bizarre incantations in e.g. a Fedora image to switch away from libc while still being able to link against other system libraries.
rjsw

NetBSD retains the old ABI as well if anything changes to a syscall.

bottlepalm

Do any devs here not use AI? I mean really not use AI.

dizza

So they thought “ok NetBSD is not unpopular enough, we need to fix it” and made this.

lproven

I see it the other way round.
A Linux user coming to Alpine will be startled how barebones and manual do-it-yourself everything is, but it is still Linux and a quick web-search tells you how to do most things. It's like Arch for grownups.
If they come to NetBSD, they are in for a cold hard dose of culture shock. You have to manually choose to install a package manager, for instance. If you do, when it "installs" things, you then are expected to read the little text files it leaves behind which tell you how to manually finish the job yourself -- something any 21st century Linux user would expect to have been done already. Not here.
It is hard.
Alpine is hard but not as hard. If this can bring Alpine levels of usability to NetBSD, I am here for it.

nanolith

Regardless of how you feel about using LLMs or using products that are developed with LLMs, it is a good idea to have an ecosystem of open source projects with differing levels of LLM involvement, including pristine software written entirely by humans.

The pragmatic argument for hard no-LLM projects: if models are to be useful, they need good input. Hand-written software that has been carefully audited is free from the kinds of feedback errors that will eventually weaken LLM code generation. Otherwise, a bad pattern gets copied. In the next generation, this bad pattern is seen a bit more often as stochastic models converge on it and more open source code adopts it. This is reinforced in the next generation and it becomes a common pattern. Then, in the next generation, this pattern is seen all over. This could be inert "non-coding DNA" like weird naming conventions or pointless comments. Or, it could be bad edge cases that become commonly exploitable.

g-b-r
Hmm I'm not sure that this project was born out of corcern for the well-being of future LLMs.
This is an argument, anyhow, but it's very far from being the only (pragmatic) one.
- nanolith
  Pragmatic in that it balances the pro- and anti- LLM sentiments. There are plenty of other valid reasons to take a hard stance against LLMs.
  I don't use them for open source projects I maintain.
  - g-b-r
    
    Ok, it's a good argument ;)

proxysna

> NetBSD kernel has spotty hardware support

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Still remember the times when the meme was that the NetBSD was running on absolutely anything.

g58892881

yes! "of course it runs netbsd" just checked, it's gone on their website. probably gone for 10 yrs alread, that's roughly when i checked last
phendrenad2

I don't think NetBSD has ever had a reputation for what they mean by "spotty hardware support" here, which is apparently uh... power management on laptops. Their links take you here: https://wiki.netbsd.org/laptops/
1vuio0pswjnm7

"Oh, how the mighty have fallen."
This suggests the commenter once thought that NetBSD was mighty
Perhaps he never had such thoughts
If so, then this comment is disingenuous
There is an obvious difference between "hardware (feature) support" and "runs NetBSD"
For example I don't need X11, ACPI, audio or WiFi to "run NetSBD". I want a server not a "desktop"

krystalgamer

more like NetBSD + busybox

123ajhz

Great website, great AI policy. The two are probably related.

mrbn100ful

>A small amount of essential software is pinned to the last version which is not tainted. We pin software as a last resort, preferring to find alternatives or move the package into the tainted repository. The current list of pinned software in “base” and “main” is:

>binutils gcc gdb libffi perl xorriso

Good luck replacing those ...

yjftsjthsd-h

Well, several of those have reasonable alternatives (e.g. clang). They're just, you know, probably also using AI

snvzz

Not using AI is a choice they can make.

They'll be left behind, but it clearly doesn't matter to them.

lproven

I for one cannot wait for all the botlickers to leave the rest of us behind.
I don't really mind where they go, so long as they go. Maybe a superhuman AGI can take them to Mars, or they can opt to "Pass 'Go', collect $200" and directly transcend.
I'm looking forward to the peace and quiet.
Please please leave me behind.

jon128

If this were based on OpenBSD or HardenedBSD I could get into it.

proton_9

while sitting on a cab a few weeks ago, i was watching other large trucks passing through, and i was wondering about what it would be like if these trucks were entirely made by bots, would travelling on roads feel less safer? when you know that the existing old stuff is made by humans and most humans who are good at their work genuinely put in effort and care in their craft, can we say the same about work generated by clankers? Really got me wondering, still split on if all this AI hype will be a net good in the long run. Sure you're more productive and end up spitting out more code, as long as its non critical SaaS stuff, who cares if things go wrong right? for crucial, mission critical stuff, relying only on AI autonomously, especially when they are still prone to make errors, seems like a very dystopian reality. Just today claude code hallucinated the first name of a person because in the username the first name was one letter.

arisudesu

Another niche distribution which opposed the AI. I hope none of its maintainers resign due to burnout from tasks which could be easily offloaded to AI.

tonymet

I've been using AI with alpine and had tremendous results. fixing legacy bugs, reducing resources, improving performance. with the right supervision, the results are great.

AI can fix a lot of issues that lingered due to lack of time & patience for proper testing and experimentation.

For example, I had VM instances crashing because of a commercial vendor's agents (telemetry, auth etc). AI identified why the crash occurred, and rewrote the buggy vendor agent with a lighter and more resilient agent.

I brought the issue up with the vendor, and they were stuck with their approach for legacy reasons. Fine! we can both operate happily now. I don't have to use their software.

1ajsht

It is really very telling that the AI bros, after flagging bad Google earnings from the front page, need to descend on a tiny new project and flag or downvote all comments that sting.

They are really very insecure people, professionally and socially.

EDIT: It took one second for an AI patrol to downvote this one.

runjake
Like you?
```
  user: 1ajsht
  created: 2 minutes ago
  karma: 0
```
- 42424242
  
  Don't waste your time here. The front page needs patrolling: There is an article that Google AI is cagey that must be flagged. I cannot do it, you need more karma.

teaearlgraycold

> AlpineBSD is an operating system based on the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible.

Fucking get over yourself.

holistio

This AI policy is so utterly backwards and stupid I don't even have a nicer way of saying it.

alpaca128

You could ask your favorite LLM to come up with a nicer way of saying it.
g-b-r
Just vibecode your own OS no?
Why do vihecoders still care of other people's software?
- ChickeNES
  
  > Just vibecode your own OS no?
  Why stop at just one?
- aloisdg
  Why do they still care of software at all?
  - 0c3ca83
    
    I don't think they do. They just care about owning shiny things.
    If you care about software (or math, or art, or literature, or any other aspect of human creativity), AI is at best like hiring someone to solve jigsaw puzzles for you.
rfgplk

Tbh it makes sense if you want a truly LLM-output free project. I can respect it.
0c3ca83
Interesting response in light of your previous post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197191
You complain an the shit future we're building. Someone says fuck you to your dystopia and starts explicitly weeding it out, and you call it backwards.
- holistio
  I see why you see it as contradiction. I guess we've all been through a lot of contradictory feelings these past one or two years.
  I just feel like eliminating LLM output is (1) not feasible (2) not the right solution to the problem.
  - 0c3ca83
    
    As far as I can tell, either LLMs naturally fail to be viable, we collectively decide to put a stop to it, or we end up in one of several dystopias.
    My bet is that we end up building an awful outcome for nearly humans, which means that trying to put a stop to it is a duty, even if it's likely to fail. I feel the same about climate change -- it's likely that we're going to fail to keep much of earth habitable, but it's not morally acceptable to stop trying.
    
    holistio
    
    I now feel like the efforts put into trying to stop it are wasted and the people wasting these efforts are smart enough that they could instead be trying to steer the whole thing in a better direction.
    Ignorance won't help us. I agree with the negatives, I just feel like this approach is backwards.
    
    0c3ca83
    
    In which direction would you steer a house fire to lead to a better outcome?
    There's no good endpoint for people if AI succeeds, it's that simple. It doesn't matter how many people get to roast marshmallows as the place burns.
- rfgplk
  I'm a hardcore LLM booster but I agree that there's a place for LLM-free projects. In fact human generated code is still superior to even frontier LLM generated code, as long as you're willing take a massive productivity penalty.
  - mrob
    
    I'm of the opinion that improved developer productivity has been a net negative for at least a decade. Regardless of my opinion of LLMs, I don't want it any easier for people to add more antifeatures and pointless changes.
  - rootnod3
    
    Gotta give the AIs some new original material to learn from, eh?

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