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

On Sun, Apr 27, 2025 at 03:02:57PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> However, I'm not sure it's very *practical* unless our position is that
> we're simply not going to package software that uses machine learning
> models (a decision that we could certainly make, but which seems a bit
> contrary to our normal desire to be a universal operating system).
> Problems just off the top of my head include:
[...]

Let me just add one more to your list, which I hinted at in the previous
message, but would like to make more explicit.

- It's more likely with training data than with (source) code that we
  will encounter situations where material is not copyrightable. (Not in
  most LLM cases, for the reasons you mentioned, but we will in other
  cases, like very probably the gnubg one.) Hence we will have to make
  an explicit decision that "this material, without an associated
  copyright notice and license" is DFSG-free. That is a very different
  kind of decisions than the ones we are used to make (via ftpmasters),
  because it is a *case by case* one, rather than *license by license*.
  As such, it scales much less.

Cheers
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . [email protected] . https://upsilon.cc/zack  _. ^ ._
Full professor of Computer Science              o     o   o     \/|V|\/
Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris     o     o o    </>   <\>
Co-founder & CSO Software Heritage            o o o     o       /\|^|/\
Mastodon: https://mastodon.xyz/@zacchiro                        '" V "'

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