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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Wed, 14 May 2025 08:58:42 +0200

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

Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

> This is going to be a really long mail message and I'm sorry. I'm not
> making it long to try to browbeat people; I'm making it long because I
> don't know how to express how I feel in fewer words and still try to
> capture the nuance and complications.

Thanks for writing this!  I find myself in agreement with most (if not
all) of it, but what is puzzling me is how this differs from the other
proposals presented earlier.

Is it possible give a short summary of principles that differs in your
thinking from Thorsten Glaser's proposal?  I find find myself agreeing
with both of you.

To me I think we have at least two camps:

1) We must have DFSG-compliant licensing of source code for everything
in main, and that source code should encompass everything needed for a
skilled person to re-create identical (although possibly not bit-by-bit
identical) artifacts.

2) It is acceptable to not have DFSG-compliant licensing for things that
aren't important for Debian and still ship those, because doing so helps
our users and helping users is more important than DFSG-licensing.  My
perception is that this is already the practical defacto situation for
Debian today, given the exceptions people prefer to ignore.  I further
think that many DD's are okay with this situation and are frustrated
when we even concern ourselves with this problem (witness the reaction
from several DD's on the GPLv2-git vs OpenSSL license issue).

I think your thinking and Thorsten's proposals are in the first camp,
and Aigar and Sam Hartman's proposal are in the second camp.

What other positions are there?  Maybe there are some nuanced camps
between the two above, muddling things.

Of course, I may also be completely misunderstanding the positions
people have here.  I'm just trying to summarize for my own understanding
so I appreciate clarifications.

Neither position has much to do with AI models as far as I can tell.  Is
there any complication beyond size and infrastructure to recreate models
that are a factor here?  Or is this "just" a re-hash of the perpetual
main vs non-free discussion?

/Simon

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