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

On Tue, 13 May 2025 at 22:00:01 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>Second, in the specific case of *software*, I think our current compromise
>is over-broad in what it protects. Software is frequently *not* a deeply
>meaningful creative human communication that reflects its creator. It's
>often algorithmic, mechanical, and functional, attributes that, elsewhere
>in our copyright compromise, define works that are not protected by
>copyright. I don't consider protecting every software program as strongly
>as a novel or painting to be morally justifiable.

I think this is a good thing to think about for a lot of the content 
that we distribute, and how we apply FOSS principles to it. I don't 
think this is a binary, I think it's a spectrum, with purely functional 
things at one end and purely artistic/expressive things at the other. We 
could say that engineering is closer to the functional end of that scale 
than art is, but neither are actually at the extremes - a lot of 
engineering has some amount of creativity and even aesthetics involved 
(a bridge needs to stay up, but a *good* bridge also doesn't look ugly) 
and a lot of art requires some amount of necessary pragmatism to make it 
something that can exist in the real world (it doesn't matter how 
beautiful your statue would hypothetically be if it collapses under its 
own weight).

Many of the executable programs we ship are mostly functional and only a 
little bit artistic/expressive, but for example the recently-introduced 
Ceratopsian themes for Debian 13 are mostly artistic and only a little 
bit functional. I don't think we should take it for granted that the 
same self-imposed rules for both of those are necessarily appropriate: 
the closer something is to the functional end of the scale, the more 
important I think the DFSG's principles are for it.

One of the reasons I'm more comfortable with packaging non-Free games 
than on other classes of non-Free software is that I consider games - 
and in particular the non-executable parts of games, like the levels and 
textures and so on - to be closer to the artistic/expressive end of that 
scale than the pragmatic/functional end. Game engines and scripts are 
more pragmatic/functional than the non-executable data they act on, but 
not as much so as for example the text editor I'm using to compose this 
email; and as a result I'm more willing to tolerate missing source code 
for a game than missing source code for a text editor.

(As with elsewhere in this thread, I'm carefully avoiding saying 
"software" because of the ambiguity between "software is any work in a 
digital format" and "software specifically means executable programs".)

     smcv