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GM Graham Morrison Graham Morrison A longtime Linux journalist, former editor of Linux Format and co-founder of Linux Voice, who now writes technical documentation for Canonical covering MAAS, Ju...

“I had a horrifying thought that, in fact, maybe all of this kind of open source advocacy we've been doing for decades, we've actually become part of the problem.”

Late Night Linux · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026

“I had a horrifying thought that, in fact, maybe all of this kind of open source advocacy we've been doing for decades, we've actually become part of the problem.” — Graham Morrison, Late Night Linux

Context

The panel was working through Debian's decision to permit AI-assisted contributions, and a co-host had just said the vote left him feeling defeated. Morrison turns the complaint back on the show: the models were trained on the millions of lines of open source code they spent decades urging people to publish. He lands it as a joke at a colleague's expense and then calls it depressing himself.

Listen to the episode → More from Graham Morrison → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

Late Night Linux Around 10:38 into the episode
Speaker 3

With the decision to say you as a contributor are responsible and you can't say, oh, well, the AI did it. So it's not my responsibility. Are they including copyright in that? So you as a contributor are responsible?

Speaker 1

…to it, it used to be that, right, fuck it, that's going on the shit list. But between Debian, the kernel, everything, it's fucking everywhere. And so what can I do? I can still moan about it, but I can't just not use any software that's got AI code in it, can I? That's just not realistic now.

Graham Morrison

I had a horrifying thought that, in fact, maybe all of this kind of open source advocacy we've been doing for decades, we've actually become part of the problem. If it wasn't for the readily available millions and millions of lines of open source code, we wouldn't have LLMs in the first place. So in fact, it's all your fault, Joe.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it is. It's completely my fault.

Graham Morrison

Such a depressing take.

Will Cooke

Oh, God. I think in Debian's case, as in lots of very popular open source projects, there is a choice between drown under the never-ending sea of pull requests and bug fixes and comments and not even bug fixes, but bugs being logged. I think that the answer for these projects is to fight fire with…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Late Night Linux

“I genuinely believe that if Debian were to say we will never use AI for anything, they would just drown and would never be able to keep up.” — Will Cooke, Late Night Linux