Re: Proposal -- Interpretation of DFSG on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Models

Simon McVittie <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sat, 19 Apr 2025 at 13:56:17 -0400, M. Zhou made this GR proposal:
>The "AI models released under open source license without original training
>data or program", a particular type of files as explained above, are not seen
>as DFSG-compliant. Hence, they can not be included in the "main" section of the
>Debian archive.

Do we have an idea of whether/how many models that match this definition 
already exist in main? In the Policy process it's usual to require an 
estimate of how many packages a particular Policy change will make 
"insta-RC-buggy", and I think GRs that change our self-imposed rules for 
what we consider to be Free should do similarly.

The project is currently in freeze in preparation for our next stable 
release[1], the result of around 2 years of work since the last stable 
release. If there are models currently in main that match this 
definition, is this GR intended to take effect immediately, potentially 
forcing the packages containing those models and their 
reverse-dependencies to be removed from main? Or is its effect intended 
to start from the beginning of the forky cycle?

Or, would it be considered to be valid for some relevant team (release 
team? ftp team?) to tag RC bugs like "foobar contains an AI model without 
original training data" with the trixie-ignore tag, so that we can get the 
trixie release out, leaving the bug to be addressed for forky?

Our pre-release freeze process is already quite long (which it has to 
be, to get a distribution of this size to a releasable quality) and a 
long freeze hurts the project's momentum and level of motivation, so I 
think it would be best if we can avoid lengthening that process further 
by pausing the release process to vote on a change to our self-imposed 
rules, particularly if that requires a subsequent pause to vote on 
something similar to [2] or [3] before the release can happen.

     smcv

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2025/03/msg00011.html
[2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004
[3] https://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003
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