Linux Kernel Becoming a Slopfest - Part 2 - Bribes From Slop Pushers Divide Us
Money can and does divide people
17 days ago: Stallman Has Explained Slop is "Marketing Hype Campaign" and Torvalds Agreed. The Difference is the Bribes.
LLM slop in Linux is not only a growing problem. It's a topic that more and more sites speak about, albeit without hard figures (talking in the abstract). There are several new examples of this in Linux RC3 coverage. When several of them say "AI surge" (or similar wordings) they mean more contributors cheat with plagiarism machines/engines and also disclose/admit this (some do not). IBM encourages and endorses this, even this week. If this gets normalised, no humans will wish to be involved in the project anymore.
When I wrote about Part 1 in other sites [1, 2] I shed some clues about what we'll cover next. This can be a rather long series and we're open to feedback/input to guide us further.
Yesterday in IRC we said: "We still wonder if we should make and actively maintain a shame list (developer/employer) for the people who contaminate Linux the most with slop plagiarism."
"Absolutely!" said somebody. There seems to be desire/need to maintain such a list, but we'll get to that much later.
What will happen if Linux and GNU's Linux-Libre become predominantly slop? Quality would for sure suffer if that happened. Worse, however, is the lack of incentive for humans to try to fix this hairball of botspam. It's infeasible. The stability of Linux would cease to be a talking point in its favour.
Apropos, regarding human factors, there's a split/rift in the PGP/GPG development community and now FreePG describes itself as "a collaboration between various GnuPG downstream packagers and OpenPGP developers. These include representatives of Arch, Debian, Fedora, NixOS, Hockeypuck, and others. It is operated on a mutual-assistance basis, as specified in its governance document."
"FreePG is not associated with g10code GmbH or the GnuPG project," it says. Remember that Werner Koch wanted to banish Richard Stallman. GnuPG and some team members are maybe just too gullible. Regardless, however, "it seems that malevolent interests have been succeeding in factionalizing all the important FOSS projects, even killing some of the most important ones like Debian dividing the labor pool in half weakens a project," an associate explains.
When the FSF (and its founder) came under attack the copycats poured gasoline on the fire, hoping to somehow "replace" the FSF. They did not succeed, but they clearly had a go at it.
"It is a war tactic to divide one's enemy/ies, e.g. try to cause India to fight China or Russia to be distant from its neighbour China," I said. "Same tactics used against Free software communities."
What does this have to do with Linux?
Well, in the kernel, like in Debian, there has been a clear spilt between developers who object to slop and ones that are apathetic or supportive (because their employer/paymaster/boss is). Torvalds, being a slave of the Linux Foundation (financially dependent), changed sides after sleazy slop pushers (architects of pyramid scheme) repeatedly bribed the management, which in various hidden ways controls the mouth of Torvalds (in 2018 they showed who who the real boss is, we'll revisit this later in the series). █