The r/opensource subreddit has banned a broad category of software projects from its forum, in rules announced over the weekend and reported on Monday by Carly Page in The Register.
The scope is wide. "The long story short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource," wrote the moderator posting as Wolvereness, who added: "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community."
Separate thresholds now apply to being featured. A project must have been actively maintained for at least a year, have an established community, and have roughly three contributors, give or take. Student projects, such as note-taking apps and PDF viewers, are not welcome, and developers may no longer use the forum to recruit maintainers.
There are rules for people as well as projects. Users must hold a Reddit account at least a year old and must have made significant prior contributions, and posting first and then asking the moderators for an exception risks a permanent ban and a mute.
The most contested provision concerns language. The announcement says that those who do not speak English should find a different community, on the reasoning that moderators cannot tell AI-written text from AI-translated text, and that a non-English speaker cannot verify the accuracy of a translation.
That rule was not unanimous. A fellow moderator posting as ssddanbrown said they had not been consulted and had learned of the changes through moderation notifications. "I don't agree with that rule. Especially so with how it was said," they wrote.
The thresholds have consequences the moderators may not have intended. One user said a nine-year-old project of theirs, with more than 300 GitHub stars and dozens of resolved issues, would no longer qualify, because they are its only contributor. The Register notes the circularity: an independent developer needs an established community before being allowed to use the forum to find one.
Enforcement was put to the test immediately. Asked whether Linux itself would fall foul of the ban, Wolvereness said it would probably still be allowed, with enforcement depending on whether a project was obviously AI-generated, and acknowledged: "There's no 'objective' way to implement this policy,"
The move lands in a wider argument. Linux maintainers recently dropped their requirement to disclose AI assistance, letting developers use the tools while holding them responsible for the resulting code, and Linus Torvalds has argued that competent developers should be free to use AI tools while warning against low-effort patches. System76 has banned AI-generated code and other content from its COSMIC desktop project, parts of GNOME have introduced similar restrictions, the debate has caused rifts within KDE, and NetBSD has been positioned as an AI-free alternative. The r/opensource announcement was later updated to point users towards r/TrueOpenSource and r/OpenSourceAIAllowed.
It is worth setting out what the test actually is. Enforcement turns on whether a project looks obviously AI-generated, and the moderator who wrote the rule says there is no objective way to apply it. The standard is therefore appearance, and the burden of satisfying it falls on the author, who has no way of knowing in advance what will satisfy it.
The language rule states the underlying principle more plainly than the AI rule does. A translated sentence and a generated sentence cannot be distinguished, so both are excluded. What is being kept out is not machine text. It is text that cannot be proved not to be machine text, which is a much larger category and includes a great deal of ordinary writing.
Our analysts have worked through the combinations. A project with one maintainer is excluded for being too small, and the community that would fix that cannot be recruited on the forum. A project that is unusually clean, consistent and well documented invites the question the rule exists to ask. A project that is none of these things raises no question at all.
The Department of Unnecessary Research therefore identifies a single reliable strategy for the modern open source contributor, and submits it without enthusiasm.
Under the new rules, the surest way to prove a human wrote your code is to submit something no machine would have bothered to write.