Debian's AI vote puts eight versions of the contributor contract on the ballot

On August 15, Debian opened a 13-day General Resolution vote on AI-assisted contributions. The ballot lists eight proposals labeled A through H, ranging from outright bans to permissive frameworks, and the spread turns a referendum on AI into a vote on which gate the project installs at the contributor side.

Debian is the volunteer-run project behind one of the most widely used Linux distributions. Its packages underpin most public-cloud images, a long list of derivative distributions, and a long tail of embedded devices. The current vote ends a two-year argument that opened in 2024, when developer Tiago Bortoletto Vaz started a mailing-list thread citing Gentoo's restrictive AI policy, ran through a withdrawn 2025 General Resolution attempt, and was set aside in early 2026 in favor of case-by-case handling. The August 15–28 ballot is the first time the question has gone to a project-wide vote.

The official Debian vote page is the canonical reference, and it lists eight options labeled A through H. Heise's English coverage describes "four competing text proposals"; Linux Compatible writes "five." The discrepancy reflects when each writeup was filed against a ballot that has been amended, not a real disagreement about the menu. What is stable across the coverage is the shape: at least one option would require contributors to attest that no LLM touched their patch; others would formalize disclosure; the most permissive would leave the question to individual maintainers, according to secondary coverage of the proposals. Proposal A was filed by Matthias Geiger, with seconds from Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues, Antoine Le Gonidec, and Simon Richter.

Debian's contributor license agreement already requires that submitters hold the rights they are granting, and a patch wholly written by a model trained on unknown corpora cannot, in most readings, satisfy that requirement. The ballot is asking which of the project's existing contracts and norms apply when an LLM did help. Secondary coverage characterizes the eight options as differing on which gate they install at the contributor side: some proposals describe a signed attestation, a public disclosure box on the patch, a maintainer-level veto, or no project-level gate at all, though the full proposal texts could not be independently verified from the truncated primary source. Hard bans, soft guardrails, and permissive defaults are three positions on the same contract question, and a two-option ballot would have flattened them into a single binary.

The strongest counterargument shows up in the Hacker News thread on the GR announcement: copyright is largely already absorbed by the contributor agreement, by small-patch contribution norms, and by project jurisdiction, so a project-level rule risks duplicating work that the existing stack already does. That position has support. It also concedes the point, because the GR is a rule about contribution norms and patch provenance, not a rule about the license grant. Naming that explicitly is what the eight-option ballot is for.

The resolution is explicitly limited to Debian work. Upstream projects are off the table for this vote. That bounds the precedent claim: it is not "the Linux kernel will adopt this rule" but "other distributions and downstream projects will read Debian's answer and pick their menu from it." A result that installs a hard attestation rule, a soft disclosure rule, or a no-project-rule outcome each produces a different second-order effect on the smaller projects that follow. Gentoo set the restrictive end of the menu Debian is now drawing from, and the result of this vote will become the next menu many of those smaller projects read.

The vote closes at 23:59:59 UTC on August 28. The tally and the option-by-option breakdown will land on the official vote page once the count is published.