Contributing / AI Policy

The following policy applies if you make a contribution to postmarketOS, code, documentation, issues, comments, artwork or any other type.

It is your responsibility to ensure that:

• You fully understand how the code in your contribution works.

• Your change is accurately described in the commit message.

• Your contribution is tested and working as described.

• To the best of your knowledge, you are not introducing bugs, especially security bugs.

• You are not violating copyright (such as software licenses, creative commons or any other).

If you continuously fail to meet these standards (e.g. due to the use of AI tools), your contributions will not be accepted in postmarketOS.

We strongly advise against using large language models or other probabilistic tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT. In our experience these tools often fail to produce correct, sensible output and issues may not be immediately obvious. This results in additional maintainer burden, draining the (already limited) time and energy of our reviewers.

Additionally AI tools have several ethical issues. They require an unreasonable amount of energy[1] and water[2] to build and operate, their models are built in part with heavily exploited workers in unacceptable working conditions[3], usually without consent from or compensation for creators of the source material[4] and oftentimes causing DDoS attacks against FOSS infrastructure in the process[5] (which in turn force the deployment of challenge-based protections and increase cost and complexity of self-hosting for everybody[6]). Furthermore they are being used to undermine labor and justify layoffs[7]. These are harms that we do not want to perpetuate, even if only indirectly.

For all reasons described above, we strongly discourage promoting AI tools in the postmarketOS communities. Please do not recommend using AI tools to other community members for solving problems, especially without linking to this policy. Discussions about AI in general (e.g. not related to a specific contribution) are best suited to the offtopic channel. If somebody keeps promoting AI tools in our other channels, we may escalate the situation according to the Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines with warnings and temporary/permanent bans.

Sources

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[1]

“After pledging to slash its greenhouse gas emissions, Microsoft’s climate pollution has grown by 30 percent as the company prioritizes AI.” — The Verge, 2024-05-15

[2]

“Over the past 12 years, 16 data centers have been approved in Santiago’s metropolitan area. Most use millions of liters of water annually to keep computers from overheating. Chile is in the midst of a drought, expected to last until 2040.” — Rest of World, 2024-05-31

[3]

“OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic” — TIME, 2023-01-18

[4]

“Amid the rise of generative AI, creators, artists and media rights holders have been forced to reckon with the unlicensed use of their copyrighted material to train AI models without consent or compensation.” — Variety, 2025-03-03

[5]

“When one of these botnets goes nuts, the result is indistinguishable from a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack — it is a distributed denial-of-service attack. Should anybody be in doubt about the moral integrity of the people running these systems, a look at the techniques they use should make the situation abundantly clear.” — LWN.net, 2025-02-14

[6]

Including our infrastructure. As of writing (2025-09), Anubis is being used by the postmarketOS gitlab instance and wiki as well as many other sites and Alpine’s gitlab is protected by go-away to fight off scrapers. Many other websites have adopted similar restrictions.

[7]

“Since the rise of generative AI, many have feared the toll it would take on the livelihood of human workers. Now CEOs are admitting AI’s impact and layoffs are starting to ramp up.” — Forbes, 2025-07-17