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

[Alexandre Oliva via Gdb <gdb@sourceware.org>]

On Jun 16, 2026, "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:

> There is no hard bright line that distinguishes between what you call
> advertising and talking about the options.

I can agree with that statement.  There is room for judgment calls, and
there is room for disagreement about judgment calls.

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?

Has Anthropic at least made a donation to the GNU Toolchain fund to pay
for this advertisement, or are we such losers that we advertise such
traps free of charge, and even fight over whether polluting our forum
with their spam is appropriate?

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?

> 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.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker            https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/
Free Software Activist     FSFLA co-founder     GNU Toolchain Engineer
Learn the truth about Richard Stallman at https://stallmansupport.org/