What do LineageOS and F-Droid (and possibly other mobile FLOSS) have to say about AI/LLM usage? (piefed.social)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by A_norny_mousse@piefed.social to c/linuxphones@lemmy.ca

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For context, I have been using a pretty niche OS on my phone for a long time but recently the community and the 3rd party appstores are flooded with LLM content - and fans. Its ethical, geopolitical and societal dangers are handwaved away at best, or ridiculed or countered with stupid non-arguments ("you wouldn't tell a farmer not to use a tractor").

Everybody is in a hurry to churn out the next pretty port of an Android app.

The actual OS devs have not taken any sort of public stance, not even in comments.

And it got me thinking. If this continues maybe LineageOS & F-Droid (no Gapps of course) might turn out to be a better alternative again, despite it being essentially Android and Not True Linux.

But how do they position themselves with AI?

If you want to suggest a 3rd option, please do so - but only if it works reliably as a daily driver - incl. telephony and messaging - on at least a small number of consumer devices that are no older than 8 years.
And only if they clearly position themselves against AI in code and generally.

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[-] A_norny_mousse@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago

Answering myself wrt F-Droid:

tl;dr: the situation appears very similar to what I describe in my OP.

They seem very focused on fighting Google's recent shenanigans and getting funded, and FOSS of course.
I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their CoC
I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their list of anti-features, and this seems to be the biggest indicator to me.
Not in their Blog either (by title, going back one year) but my search engine gave me this article, which seems to have been removed since: Home much of F-Droid is LLM-generated.
There's a forum post asking a similar question with some very predictable drama. Straight out the door some "contributor" ridicules OP's reasonable question in that typical, passive-aggressive smiley emoji coder way. Just what I have experienced. Thankfully other "contributors" at least see the value in pondering these things. While the question is never fully answered, the thread contains some interesting links to how other FOSS projects position themselves.

I found an important clue in the latter: