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

Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:10:10 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 02:14:34PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I suspect no source technically exists for those weights anywhere, since
> upstream's training work was fairly manual as I recall and is not
> something they tend to work iteratively on, but it's possible that one of
> the upstream developers has all of the data and scripts somewhere.

FWIW, I looked specifically in the gnubg case a while ago, because it
was an interesting test case for this discussion. Here's what I found
out:

- The training program (using the language from the GR draft) is
  allegedly available and licensed under GPL3.

- The training data is allegedly available as well, but comes without
  any declared license. I tend to concur with you, Russ, that it's very
  likely non-copyrightable material. But that's only partly reassuring
  to me, because I'm not sure how Debian would practically go about
  ruling that certain stuff that comes without copyright/license is fine
  for main, whereas other stuff in the same situation is not.

Links to the above two element are public, but not very well documented.
I had to dig them up discussing on the gnubg mailing list and some links
were provided to me only in private mail (I don't know why).

I wrote "allegedly available" above because while I have been able to
retrieve all of it, I was not able to reproduce/rerun it. (Just to
mention the *first* hurdle one would encounter to do so in modern
Debian: it's all Python 2.)

My gut feeling is that gnubg might be salvagable to remain in main if
this GR is adopted (provided significant work is poured into it to test
reproducibility at least once), but it'd be wise to have a broader
impact analysis, for the good reasons mentioned by Simon.

Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . [email protected] . https://upsilon.cc/zack  _. ^ ._
Full professor of Computer Science              o     o   o     \/|V|\/
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Mastodon: https://mastodon.xyz/@zacchiro                        '" V "'

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