Re: Packages that work with LLMs

Hello,

Thanks for your very sharp points, I could not quickly identify those 
files you mentioned, as if I could identify it, I would report those 
bugs to them.

Apertus has indeed done an impressive job laying the groundwork for a 
free LLM, and we should recognize that as a solid starting point.

I strongly encourage you to actively collaborate with the Apertus team 
directly. They have the door for feedback.

I wish we could have GNU LLM which has all those issues solved, yet we 
do not have it. We can ask such projects to align with the free software 
philosophy and tell them where issues are and how could it be solved.

I have personally worked on relicensing significant LLMs to become fully 
free, so I know it is entirely achievable.

Please you could take your detailed bug reports and specific proposals 
(regarding the attribution handling, filter script, the opt-out 
mechanisms) straight to their project. By working directly with them to 
resolve these gaps, we (you and me and others) can help turn Apertus 
into the fully compliant and reproducible model we all strive for.

Keep up the good work!

On 2026-08-11 18:16, Michel Lind wrote:
> 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

-- 
Jean Louis