Apple can't distribute them - coreutils is GPLv3, which is incompatible with Apple's immutable system volume.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html#section6
(There are other issues with GPLv3 which make it a dubious choice for companies like Apple, but this one is particularly problematic.)
We also test GNU coreutils on macOS. It is a bit tricky since the other maintainers and I don't own any macOS machines for testing. But we seem to do well enough with a shared system that Adélie Linux kindly allows the compile farm [1] to use, along with some additional CI machines.
Posix is more an art form documenting the far gone past rather than a practical tool
But the only concrete example I can think of is that `cat -n a b`, if `a` doesn't end in a newline, produces something that is obviously not what the user wanted. GNU cat does it right.
I didn't report it to the openbsd people because I didn't want them to yell at me that `-n` is nonstandard anyway with no "right" behavior, so I should STFU. Which would be what I'd expect from having reported problems in the past.
The slop problem is very real. People are spewing reams of bad code that generates entropy faster than humans or LLMs can clean it up. LLM best practices are not yet obvious, and we're still figuring out how best to leverage them while maintaining code quality and human understanding.
... but LLMs are coming whether we want them or not. Models keep consistently improving, the slop keeps getting better, and human-only development is going to struggle to keep up.
In my day job, I'm driving an enormous number of tokens at Astra+Ultramax solving problems in Lean 4 that previously we never would have attempted simply due to the incredible human engineering cost; we review the high-level lemmas and let it prove the rest.
LLMs are the only solution I've seen over these decades that could finally close the feature/usability gap between mainstream and more niche operating systems -- software support, features, drivers, and other broad usability barriers. All of that has historically been far too much work for a much smaller developer community to reasonably undertake.
Hating AI isn't going to make it go away.
Think about how far Linux has/hasn't come in the last 10 years. The user experience is nicer, drivers "just work" more, there's more support for more stuff...but at the end of the day, the actual computing experience is mostly the same today as when I installed Debian back in 2016. It's polish, interoperability, etc that's improved.
Maybe VR takes off and takes over the desktop, and then openBSD can't keep up with that, but I don't think that's likely. So what are they trying to "keep up" with?
In this case, reading the link you're replying under, it's being able to mount a disk formatted with a popular filesystem. The alternative here is waiting for a human to type this relatively "solved" problem, as a procedural requirement, more than anything.
So, it can easily mean "things won't work in this OS". But, that's to be expected with FreeBSD, for legitimately good (from the perspective of FreeBSD) reasons.
Theo de Raadt would spin in his grave — after the security implications of this to OpenBSD gives him a fatal aneurysm.
Either that, or he'll surprise-launch OpenLLM, a model bundled in the next OpenBSD release that produces driver code free of security bugs.
you could have the driver code prove it implements a spec, that there's no UB, that hardware invariants are maintained, that routines take a fixed time to execute.
the formal driver spec must still be written by sober, well-caffeinated humans of course.
Isn't he still alive?
Nothing in that post is against using an LLM. It's all about copyright:
>Since every file in OpenBSD has been continually verified to ensure correct Copyright, and we've even deleted code which has incorrect Copyright, the chances of us accepting such new code with such a suspicious Copyright situation is zero.
Once the current bubble pops we're going to see a lot of litigation over copyright enfringement by LLMs. Currently no one wants to rock the boat because everyone hopes to make a trillion dollars from AI, Oracle included, once they see they can't the knives are going to come out and I wouldn't want to be Linux at that point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America
Also my personal opinion about copyright _in the FOSS domain_ is that I simply dont care. Copyleft as the GNU folks like to call it is just using the copyright laws to achieves certain free software objectives. If that doesnt work anymore there will be another fix
The BSD licences are not copyleft, or indeed part of the GNU copyright regime.
Copyright is dead.
I remember hearing that in 1996 too.
It took a while for the DMCA to happen after Napster. But it indeed happened, and we all know the saying about history repeating itself.
By the time they came for Napster technology had already moved on. I can still download entire albums and movies in minutes 2 decades later. Heck, Usenet is still a bastion of piracy and that's been around for 46 years.
You may not care, but if the OS you prefer to run is the defendant in a copyright case, that's likely to impact you in a negative way.
"Those that do not learn history" and so forth.
It polarizes people to either join the "the LLM is my god" crowd or the "if AI touches the repo, it's all slop" crowd.
The careful balance is rarely discussed, probably because that's the part that still takes work.
Agents and LLM-assisted coding currently work within the confines of already working hand-coded OSes, language frameworks, test harnesses and even CLI tooling. Pull one of those out, and agents become unhinged and they lose direction.
https://events.eurobsdcon.org/media/2026/submissions/ZGDXQR/...
Talked to bluhm@ after that talk in Brussels and the general feeling (from what I can remember from the conversation) so far is that there is a large increase in overall reports (good and bad), but that the severity of what is reported has not really increased. This also mirrors my own experience from reading source-changes@. In essence, it seems like we have known how to build secure software for the last thirty or so years, just that most do not seem to have bothered to do so.
https://www.reddit.com/r/openbsd/s/k0dz2WrkCo
In that thread I suggested he submit it to the ports tree, I'm not sure if he took my advice or came up with the idea on his own. At any rate this is cool.
I also respect Wine and OpenBSD and their rules to not have any LLM code in the repo/ports. So my approach was to iterate over solutions, find approach that works, ask AI to "just see if my idea even works", learn what/how/why of that approach, generate some supporting manuals for myself (for example how to decode %gs instructions and how to reencode them) and then write my own code based just on decoding tables (and not LLM code).
I did not know how to work with REX/SIB/ModRM, how to detect prefixes, how to parse every single instruction that contains %gs, how offsets work, how to encode jmp rels, why I want to use JMP *0(%RIP) instead of JMP 32rel on return, why I want to leave stub on SIGUSR (or any other signal). But I do know now.
I was incredibly lucky that patching just these %gs instructions were enough to launch Factorio and play, with broken sound, but anyways! Holy molly this was and is so much FUN!
The approach still feels like cheating, and if it feels the same for you, I perfectly understand.
> I had some success in porting Wine to amd64.OpenBSD. Was able to run a few = games. But that required in memory patching of %gs commands (LLM's suggesti= on and 1st implementation, then I re-did it from scratch - I'm not that sma= rt with amd64 assembly code)
Also, it's not a single author. Other people contributed significantly and their contributions don't seem written by AI: https://github.com/NethIafin/wine/commits/openbsd-master/
[0]: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=179070255546118&w=2