The moderators of the open source subreddit now refuse any project that uses, is produced by or targets AI. The new rules have led to a sling and the creation of a competing forum.
On Saturday evening, the r/opensource moderation team published a new submission policy whose flagship measure can be summed up in one sentence: any project that uses, has been generated by, or is intended for AI no longer has a place on the forum. The moderators believe that AI, in its current form, is incompatible with the spirit of open source.
Rules considered too broad
The comments became so inflamed that a rival subreddit, r/trueopensource, was opened in the aftermath. One of the moderators, Wolvereness, tried to qualify this by mentioning a selective application — software whose accessibility feature, such as automatic captioning, based on AI could be tolerated. Many users, however, point out that the Linux kernel already contains AI-generated code, which would make a host of projects ineligible.
The rules go further: proposed projects must be at least one year old, actively maintained and have several contributors, which closes the door to solo developers; calls for contributors or maintainers are no longer accepted. Above all, non-English speakers are invited to look elsewhere: the moderators say they cannot distinguish a text written by AI from a text translated by AI, and consider that an author who does not speak English cannot verify the translation himself.
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