Meeting started at 2025-09-10 14:01:18 UTC

The Meeting name is 'Fedora Council Meeting'

!hi

Aoife Moloney (amoloney)

!hi

Jef Spaleta (jspaleta) - he / him / his

!hi

Miro Hrončok (churchyard) - he / him / his or they / them / theirs

!hi

Jona Azizaj (jonatoni) - she / her / hers

!hi

David Cantrell (dcantrell) - he / him / his

Jef Spaleta: you have been updating most of the tickets that are in flight right now, s there anything else you want to talk about here with council on them? Namely the acceptance use policy and conflict of interest guidelines

sure... lets to the aup policy because its is blocking matrix transition work

should i set the topic?

oop, Ill do that! sorry

So while its not clear, this is blocking technical work asociated with addressing CSAM which is ticket 530. The AUP is live now. but element needs the request to include it to come from a specific email address.. so they can have assurance that its a valid request

There is an email chain for matrixadmin@fedoraproject.org with an element ticket SUP-1800 emal that needs to be replied to. And I'm not on that alias

The AUP is live at. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/chat-aup/.

nirik: or Gwmngilfen might be able to help with the email alias

I've actually answered that twice... but yes, it's an alias, and I have fwded you the email. ;)

im not sure a forward reply from my email will suffice..but ill try

related to this, should we have something more visible to track the progress? Or, because of the horrible nature of the issue, is it better to keep it to a select few?

there is an infra ticket that nirik made me aware of that. I think after the AUP is sorted out, that ticket becomes actionable

that sounds ok to me, and we have the council issue that we can update as well with the info as it becomes available

I think after this discussion probably continues in the 530 ticket

so I think that's it for this ticket.

ack, if no one else has any questions or anything they want to discuss on it, we can move on to the Conflict of Interest update

Okay so I'm in an ongoing private conversation with legal that will probably material impact the next draft. Its specifically discussion about Red Hat employees interacting with other Red Hat employees in the context of Fedora processes.

Because there are heirachal relationships there, that needs to be spoken to.

I feel like this has the potential to become an open can of worms in pandoras box

thank you though for working on this

no... something else came up.. and im taking the discrention to integrate what im learning in the this document

I see 🤔 well, best to try cover as many bases as we can in this one I suppose!

either way, its appreciated you driving it

is there any more to be said on it right nw? or any questions to/from ppl on it?

nope.

Next topic then?

I read trough the proposal once again and it feels a tad unfinished. I also worry about it not concerning the license/copyright/ethics aspect of AI contributions

*not covering

Youre right in your feeling - its still a WIP and very much in need of finishing off. I think we need to put some momentum behind it to see it over the line

is this something we should try to finish within council, or outsource it to someone more ... I dunno, embedded maybe, in the AI world?

well that wouldn't be very objective

are you saying that the this is an objective process as it exists?

nope, but definitely asking someone in the AI world to write an AI policy is not going to be

to write all of it? No... but I get the feeling we lack thought leader expertise about the state-of-the-art in the open source LLM/ML space as the conersation stands.

I see what you mean. My logic was that at least it would be written by someone who actually knows what theyre talking about because I sure dont when it comes to this stuff 😅

Honestly, I'm not sure we can have a real policy right now because the field is so young. The actual concerns I have are not addressed anywhere. People either ignore them or pretend that they will be resolved some day or are just non-problems. But I'm not convinced of that. So we could write a policy today which basically amounts to advertising more than a policy. Announcing we recognize AI and recognize that you, contributor, probably use it and we think that's A-OK. Or something.

so the question then I suppose is: Is there anyone in council who feels they are capable of forming these guildelines based on the WIP we have? Or should we find someone who is more knowledgeable to finish out the WIP on our behalf? Id like to get to a point where we have something to vote yes or no to as an official guideline

If there are unaddressed concerns that would inform policy.. we need to have those conversations with the people working the space that are trying to work within our existing set of policy principles. The people trying to do the things in an open source way.

there's also a way to do it this way: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy

I am not sayin I want to replicate that as is but they certainly do have a point

the Gentoo policy is what I would want for Fedora _right now_, with the understanding that we can change things later. specifically items #1 and #3. I already know #2, everything from AI systems is hot garbage anyway

that policy is effectively impossible.. because as soon as any major upstream uses generative AI for anything... we'd have to stop making use of it.

I think we should have *something* rather than nothing

yeah, but if that's the right thing to do, then that's the right thing to do

is it the right thing?

that's explicitly excluded from the gentoo policy: " It does not prohibit adding ... software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream. "

I really don't want to get involved with technology that is actively trying to make humanity dumber.

define "right". it's certainly the ethical thing to do

dcantrell: as an advid vim user.. I can argue passionately that IDEs actively make users dumber

but enforcing a no IDE usage rule for contributions... and forcing everyone to use vim as god intented... feels.. like...overreach

Reminder - we are now splitting hairs on what a policy would say. Lets go back to who should drive the completion of these guidelines :p

that's not what I'm saying

I am sorry, I need to leave when things started to be interesting :D

I'll make sure to mention the gentoo policy in discussion.fp.o

man, this conversation is all about logical fallacies

*then* we can argue about the content again :D

if there are unaddressed concerns, we should be having conversations about those concerns with people who understand the state-of-the-art of open source tooling

hope the vet goes ok mhroncok ±

hope the vet goes ok mhroncok !

as someone who has built a career on open source software, I do not like what generative systems are doing. spitting code out to new developers and then those developers claiming ownership

we've spent decades building open source licenses specifically for the purposes of sharing and learning and educating while at the same time retaining ownership

AI is taking a dump on all of that and I find it really offensive

a pollicy statement right now as a forcing function to try to get those concerns addressed.. is actively hostile

this is why I have concerns about "what about copyright?" "what about ownership?" "what about creator rights?"

so far my various conversations have been met with shrugs and responses like "eh, we'll figure it out"

which to me is not good enough

if you have a concern about coyrpight that is significant enough to need to be addressed.. then like I said... that impacts everything we ship

explain how

because the people who understand the state-of-the-art will go elsewhere and they will not be in our community

any code now that I've written and put on the internet is now in the belly of every LLM and can be spit back out at someone sans the copyright and licensing block

does not one care about open source licensing anymore?

did I not get the memo?

yes.. and any code from any upstream in the future may be generated from AI

so we're saying open source licensing is moot now. if it's open, do whatever the hell you want

nothing matters anymore

You likely didnt get AI to write you one so probably not :p

if you have copyright concerns... i dont understand how splitting out our thin layer of contributions.. when the vast sea of open source upstream projects would be at risks.. does anything to address the concerns about copyright

im not saying its moot. Im saying your drawing the line in the sand at the wrong place

I'm thinking of Fedora as a place of many upstream projects. Our contributors are also the upstreams for many things we include (myself included)

so I am thinking of a Fedora policy as also the policy for those upstreams

but if that's not the case, then I don't know what the Fedora policy covers

fedora policy is NOT the policy of upstreams...

and in fact fedora is suppose to take an upstream first approach

so here's the thing, many upstreams are going to look to distribution policies to make their policies. and if we're doing the same, then it's a stalemate

we have about ~6 mins left in this meetig, lets try get to some sort of agreement on what to do next please. We have a ticket, we have a WIP and we have a lot of opinions, all the ingredients to make...something. So, should we continue wordsmithing this within council and try to finish out the guidelines ourselves? If so, who wants to oversee this work? I can ask for an owner in the ticket if thats what we want to do and not here when were missing members

OR

i disgree.. i think whats happening around freedesktop right now and their investment in flatpaks.. is suggestive that upstreams look a distribution policy as being out of step with upstream

Your ideas here

Should we have a session for council purely for workshopping this topic?

I would not be opposed to that

its probably our best course of action rn, as I dont feel like were going to get further with the guidelines as they stand and I dont want to usurp precious meeting time at our next one. So Ill action myself to plan a workshopping session for the AI Guidelines WIP for next week for council (and anyone else really who would like to attend). We can schedule a matrix room hour, drop in a jitsi link and have a conversation

and with that