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Free Software and LLM Contribution Policies
Posted on 2026-06-26 by Graham
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 axiomatic, it seems perverse to introduce a policy that restrict someone’s freedom regarding the way they use their computer to work with the software, at the point of contributing to the software.
Imagine a contributor policy that says ‘you can’t submit patches to this project that you edit with vim’, or ‘we reject submissions if we find that you used Windows to test them’. These seem absurd, but they’re consistent with what’s happening with LLMs: the project team doesn’t like the tool you used to prepare the software change, so it rejects the change regardless of the consequences of doing so.
2. Copyleft
In Free as in Freedom (2.0), Richard Stallman observes that "use of copyright was not necessarily unethical. What was bad about software copyright was the way it was typically used, and designed to be used: to deny the user essential freedoms."
In "What is copyleft?", he writes, ‘proprietary software developers use copyright to take away the user’s freedom; we use copyright to guarantee their freedom. That’s why we reverse the name, changing "copyright" to "copyleft".’
One of the concerns people have with LLM-authored contributions – a subset of the types of contribution these policies ban – is that the copyright status is unclear in many places, with one early indicator being that LLM-authored contributions might not be copyrightable.
If this is the case, then nobody can remove the freedom of people who use that contribution. If that isn’t the case, and the work is the creation of the person who used the AI tool, then they can use a freedom-preserving license.
If, instead, we enter a new era of copyright … well, anything could happen, but the way to have a say is to build competence, authenticity, and respect in society by engaging with the problem, not by withdrawing from it.
3. Freedom to Fork
The freedom to distribute your modifications and to distribute copies of the software explicitly doesn’t require people to ‘upstream’ their modifications; that is, to contribute them back to the place where they originally got the software. In fact, licenses with clauses that mandate upstreaming are non-free, for example, the earliest versions of the APSL.
Someone who modifies your software using an LLM, then has their upstream patch rejected, is free to distribute it anyway, creating a fork in your project. They might choose to track and apply changes in your project – not too much work, after all they can use an LLM to do it – so that your version of the project becomes the one with the recognizable name, but a subset of the features. At one extreme, this means fracturing the project’s community, along tool-use lines. At another extreme, it means the original project becomes irrelevant and the replacement takes over, as happened to GCC and EGCS.
4. Historical Discontinuity
Free software always has coexisted with and even used non-free software. GNU Emacs was only one of about 30 emacs implementations. GNU itself uses Unix as its design document, and the original GNU components ran on proprietary UNIX distributions, because there was no fully-free environment available – so people used proprietary development tools, libraries, shells, and kernels. Even today, many free software components are portable to proprietary environments like Windows or macOS, and you can use proprietary tools like Microsoft’s compiler or NotePad++ to work on them.
Anti-LLM policy muddles the software freedom message by making the community values more about position on LLMs than about software freedom. This risks making it easier to...