Re: Packages that work with LLMs

On Sun, 2026-03-15 at 18:34 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider   
> ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,    
> ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.
> ]]]
> 
> We have found one LLM, Apertus, which seems actually to be free.
> All the other candidates people suggested proved clearly not to be
> free.

I'd personally be less unhappy about an LLM that is properly free
software, though even then the ecological and job-displacement side
effects might still be problematic.

However... is there a write-up on the finding that Apertus qualifies as
free software? Ellie and I took a quick look at what they disclose on
their website (thanks for the pointer here) and flagged some issues to
them

https://github.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/issues/10

TL;DR

- Ellie raised concerns around permissively licensed code often still
requiring attribution
- I raised a question about their opt-out mechanism - and how it would
work with popular repos that have a lot of forks on GitHub. Would the
original project saying "we want to opt out" be honored by a scraper
finding a mirror of that project? Ditto with a tarball / dpkg / rpm
containing that software
- we *think* they at least drop non-permissively licensed content, but
apparently the filter script is not free/open source at the moment, so
that part is not reproducible

Best regards,

-- 
 _o) Michel Lind
_( ) https://keyoxide.org/5dce2e7e9c3b1cffd335c1d78b229d2f7ccc04f2
     README:    https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Salimma#README

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