Open Slopware

Free/Open Source Software tainted by LLM developers/developed by genAI boosters, along with alternatives.

The intention of this list is to raise awareness of this technology's usage in popular software, as well as give people informed alternatives that they can reach for when they want to make decisions for themselves. This is not a list created so you can go and give these projects trouble for their decision. If you want to file a complaint about it with them, we consider that acceptable but ask that it be done respectfully and constructively.

For more information on why we think this list matters, please see Why not LLMs?.

Contributing

To contribute to this list, file a pull request adding it to the appropriate category, along with any known alternatives. The pull request must include links to evidence of such (social media posts, screenshots, commit history, links to CLAUDE.md, etc). Title the pull request "Add <software-name>" or such.

Criteria

The criteria for being included in this repository are any of:

1. One or more core/prominent developers openly use LLMs in any level of supportive capacity to develop this software specifically. Accepting drive-by or minor contributions that happen to use LLMs is NOT qualifying. This may change in the future.
2. The software itself integrates genAI features of any kind, internally or externally.

Removal

Any project here may be removed as long as the following become true, even if prior LLM-authored code remains:

1. The project establishes a "No genAI" policy, where the core developers commit to no longer using LLMs for developing that project in particular and no longer accepting obvious LLM-authored contributions, and state the policy prominently in their repo.
2. Any genAI functionality of the project itself is removed in its entirety. "Kill switches" are insufficient.

Tainted Software

Browsers

Alternative browsers

• LibreWolf (Firefox fork) has made statements and efforts to remove Mozilla's push for "AI". They also acknowledge that the notion of "apolitical" technology is a futile one.
  • For Android, while not officially related, some of the same developers make IronFox
• GNOME's Epiphany (WebKit based) does not currently have a stance, but GNOME developers on the whole show aware anti-"AI" sentiments and roll out wide reaching rules against it.
• Servo (New engine, formerly owned by Mozilla, now by a co-op) is not yet daily driver ready, but has strong protections for when it is some time in the future.

Command-Line Shells

Chat

Computer Graphics

Photography

Terminal Emulators

Developer Tools

Programming Languages

Note on alternative languages

Suggestions for alternative programming languages are necessarily more complex than many other categories considered here, as that's one of the core technical choices to be made when starting a new software development project.

Depending on your needs and technical concerns, you may find any number of different alternative languages useful. For example, when considering alternatives to .NET, Java or Scala may be interesting candidates from the perspective of being similar VM-based frameworks, while Python or Rust may be interesting alternatives in other ways.

Editors

Accessibility Tools

Microcontroller Tools and Libraries

Service Monitoring

Libraries

Rust

CSS

JavaScript / TypeScript

Game Engines

Mathematics software

Services/Utilities

Operating Systems

Why not LLMs?

Sketching things in; citations needed.

Confabulation

LLMs work by generating something that looks like what the prompt has asked for. They're prediction engines; after generating the first best-match token, they search for the next token that's most likely to come next.

Sometimes, this does what you want. Frequently, it's something wrong. LLMs have no "understanding" or "reasoning" despite the marketing, and they have no way of knowing what's true or not. They don't "know" anything, they're just generating something like an answer.

TODO: links/discussion of the guy who had an LLM delete everything and then whoopsie about it, article about an LLM "reviewing" someone's documents but not actually every reading them, etc.

Labor

Because LLMs generating things that look like answers, executives who work by accepting things that look like answers think they're magic.

• people are losing their jobs because executives and managers are investing resources in LLMs instead of salaries; they believe they'll be able to regain the productivity losses by using LLMs and cheaper employees
• it's rare for people to actually lose their jobs directly because of LLMs, but it does happen:
  • Tailwind's business is driven by people accessing their documentation; their business has tanked because LLMs just answer people's questions (or do they?), so nobody goes to their website and buys. They laid off 75% of their staff in 2026-01.

This genius idea of using fresh out of college (or whatever) junior employees to do everything with the help of LLMs will result in a complete lack of experienced employees. Nobody using LLMs is learning anything other than how to make them do what you want.

Who's going to fix the security problems introduced by code nobody on the team understands? Who's going to be able to to fact check when "all" information is presented from LLM answers that may have been tweaked by the owners?

Environment

LLMs are insanely inefficient, requiring enormous amounts of datacenter resources including:

• electricity
• water
• specialized GPUs
• RAM
• storage
• they need to constantly re-train on everything

Theft

LLMs are trained on the contents of the Internet, including pirated content. This is bad because:

• it ignores copyright and licensing completely
• LLM scrapers ignore robots.txt and other mechanisms intended to prevent bots from overwhelming a site's resources
• it includes horrendous content like revenge porn and child sexual assault material (CSAM)

License

This repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license. Please see LICENSE.txt for more information.