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KDE and AI, and you, and me
(pointieststick.com)
Personal opinion: Nathan seems to be really side-stepping a lot of concerns brought of up in the comments there. And referring to people coming together collectively in an open-letter when virtually all other channels are closed as 'brigading' is... Not cool. Edit: he retracted the use of brigading.
EDIT 2: Nate has since closed the comments on his blog, and the one discussion thread on KDE Discuss about the AI Policy was closed suddenly without explanation after a KDE developer began to discuss the ethics of AI use. Nate then responded after the thread was closed with this:
Ok, but how can it be called unnecessary involvement when it's simply public comment, for which an avenue was provided? What is "the business of maintainers" only? Of course maintainers get more say... that does not mean everyone else who has a say should shut up if they don't like it. If all of the public feedback was constructive towards the proposal without such severe disagreement on the basis, surely the author would welcome it. When popular disagreements like this come up it would be nice to have the crux of it addressed without being strawmanned to answer for the actions of some hooligan of the day.
The main point of OP is that this was a misunderstanding that turned into an overreaction. It sounds like there was never any confusion among the maintainers that they were trying to create a policy to prevent LLM slop PRs and reduce maintenance burden. Somehow non-maintainers derailed the discussion into an anti-AI tirade that was completely unproductive.
So basically: yes people should shut up if they don't have anything productive to add to the discussion.