Re: Nominations for Anthropic’s Claude for Open Source program

[Eli Zaretskii via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

> Cc: Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>, Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com>,
>  Adhemerval Zanella Netto <adhemerval.zanella@linaro.org>, glibc
>  developers <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>, gdb developers <gdb@sourceware.org>
> Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:28:57 -0300
> From: Alexandre Oliva via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>
> 
> Now, if it was another mailing list member forwarding spam that
> advertised a 30-days-gratis bait for a service entirely misaligned with
> the purposes of GNU in general and of GNU libc specifically, to the
> point of opposing those purposes, would you still be favorable to it?

That's a significant exaggeration, to put it mildly.  I invite you
(and everyone else who wants to make up their minds independently) to
re-read the original message posted by David.  I find no advertisement
there, let alone spam.

Here's that message again:

  Anthropic is generously offering 6 months of Claude Max 20x to Free
  and Open Source Software projects to support the FOSS
  ecosystem. These tools can be incredibly helpful with reviewing
  upstream code, evaluating the conformance of a particular interface
  to a standard, or just for your own learning and exploring the
  implementation of the project or subsystem.

  If you are an established, active contributor to the GNU Toolchain
  and are interested in having access to Claude Max 20x under
  Anthropic’s Claude for Open Source program, please respond to this
  email thread with a short description of how you would utilize the
  access and the potential impact on the GNU Toolchain.  The program's
  slots are limited and Carlos O'Donell and I plan to review the
  proposals. Please keep in mind that these are individual grants from
  Anthropic to you personally. If you are approved you’ll get an email
  from Anthropic with further instructions.

  While the current GNU Project policy is not to accept LLM-generated
  content in the projects, that still leaves other uses like bug
  triage, patch review, and research as ways to use these tools.

This basically says that if someone wants to use the 6-month offer to
work on GNU tools, they should describe their plans and apply for a
slot in using the tools.  That's it.  It even explicitly says in a
P.S. that "This is not an endorsement of Anthropic, Claude or LLMs".

Please be fair and don't accuse people who post here in something they
didn't say.  You don't have to agree, and you don't need to volunteer
to use Anthropic's proposal, but let's have minimally-civil
discussions here, okay?  Even your selection of
intentionally-denigrating words ("spam", "losers", etc.) is highly
inappropriate in civilized discussions, given what the original
message actually said.

> Will your stance change when bots subscribe to these lists, and then
> start posting advertisement targeted at our developers but otherwise
> bearing no relationship with the project?  Will you then call for such
> spam to be blocked, or will we all have to endure it because some day
> you decreed that it was ok?

Not relevant.  Blocking spam and bots, regardless of the content of
those messages, is the job of the list moderators and they generally
do their job just fine so far.

> > Where I draw the line, and where it can be drawn is in what we write down
> > in our documentation, likewise in our process.
> 
> Our mailing lists are part of the project as well, and people who take
> part in the project or even lead it are expected to behave in line with
> the project, rather than against it, at the very least when
> participating in project fora and activities.
> 
> Advertising services antagonic to and destructive of user freedom is
> really way out of line.

Again, there was no advertising.  This is uncalled-for.  Please find
more polite words to express your disagreement (if you must: after
all, that was a call for volunteers, and you don't have to volunteer
nor respond if you don't like the proposal).

More generally, I'm disappointed by the hostility and the general
style some people allow themselves to use in this discussion.  We
don't deserve to call ourselves a community that promotes a better
society if we cannot talk between ourselves in a kinder manner.  Shame
on us!