2026-10-24 –, Room 250
Not since the 1980s has technology changed as quickly as in recent months. Reprising the early PC era, large for-profit companies dictate the pace and control of Large-Language-Model-backed generative artificial intelligence (LLM-gen-AI).
The FOSS community was built on sharing and collaboration. As in past eras, the big tech companies pushing us to use their products do not share these goals, preferring to make us dependent on what they sell rather than giving us control over the technology we use.
We must push back, but we must do so carefully and strategically.
The rise of for-profit LLM-gen-AI has created huge, and very reasonable, backlash against these companies, and sometimes against LLM-gen-AI itself. Outside the FOSS community, nearly every software developer uses LLM-gen-AI tools every day. Within our FOSS world, many have been able to continue their work without LLM-gen-AI tools, and many FOSS projects support this approach. Tension abounds between these approaches, and our community has been drawn into the fray.
Of course, we shouldn't accept useless slop; yet, LLM-gen-AI does not necessarily represent an existential threat to FOSS. Disciplined and careful usage of LLM-gen-AI may — just as early PCs did — provide us with the very tools we need to improve our community, and undo the bad policies promulgated by the big tech companies who sell the most popular versions of these tools.
In this talk, we will explore the landscape of LLM-gen-AI tools, and how they can help and hurt FOSS, while also examining the inequalities that LLM-gen-AI will exacerbate if we fail to tackle them.
Denver is a software right-to-repair activist who is currently Director for Digital Autonomy at Software Freedom Conservancy, where he enforces software right-to-repair licenses such as the GPL, and is also a director of the worker co-operative that runs JMP.chat, a FOSS phone number (texting/calling) service. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux and wdiff. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as FOSSY, SCALE, the Canadian Repair Convention, WineConf, FOSDEM, Linux Plumbers Conference, SFSCON, CopyleftConf, Radical Networks, DebConf and the Open Video Conference.