Flathub moves to ban nearly all apps and submissions made with generative AI

Flathub, one of the most popular ways to grab applications on Linux, has a newly updated generative AI policy - where it's pretty much all banned. However, there is an exception noted for "mature, well-maintained projects" but it's not a guarantee.

A new commit was sent in and merged into the documentation, which is live now, that notes "Reword LLM policy to make it clear it's not allowed". The new policy reads:

Generative AI policy

This policy applies to both the application being submitted to Flathub and the Flathub submission itself, including the manifest, metadata, patches, build scripts, and pull request. For the purpose of this policy, applications include BaseApps, extensions, and any other artifacts that can be produced by flatpak-builder.

Submission pull requests must not be generated, opened, or automated using AI tools or agents. Please also do not request review from any AI tools in the submission PR. Automated Copilot reviews on GitHub can be disabled by the submitter by going here and changing Repository access to exclude the repo or disabling the global "Automatic Copilot code review" found here.

Applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed.

Applications or changes containing copyrighted, license-incompatible, or ethically questionable code are not allowed.

These submissions can be rejected without any further review.

Repeatedly violating these policies may result in a permanent ban from future submissions and activities.

Exceptions may be granted for mature, well-maintained projects.

To give some more context, developer Bart Piotrowski mentioned in a social media post on Mastodon:

We have updated Flathub's LLM policy to explicitly disallow AI usage for both the submission process and applications being submitted.

https://github.com/flathub-infra/documentation/commit/992f57b30de98ddbd5e80959e9672998c83c8c97

I've had some reservations about it, so the wording before that commit was relatively milder. I know it's an unpopular opinion on the Fediverse, but I do think LLMs are inevitable, and the reality is that you can expect less organically grown code as time goes on. I believe it can be a useful tool in and outside FOSS; I hoped we will see a larger number of apps where authors made some effort beyond prompting an agent. Meanwhile, the number of unpleasant interactions I've had with entitled submitters acting as if they were bestowing their brilliant software upon us idiots who are rejecting it went through the roof in the last month. I'm tired.

As always, we are not applying this retroactively, so any vibecoded apps which were already published will remain available.

What are your thoughts on this? No matter which side of the argument you're on, having clearly defined rules around it is a good thing so that it's clear for everyone.