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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Wed, 14 May 2025 12:04:49 +0200

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

Aigars Mahinovs <[email protected]> writes:

> On Wed, 14 May 2025 at 08:58, Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 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) We must have DFSG-compliant licensing of source code for everything
> in main, but training data is not part of source code. Instead source code for
> training models would be code and protocol describing how to generate
> or gather training data in such a way that a skilled person would be able to
> re-create functionally the same (although not identical) artifacts. If
> re-creation
> is impractical (due to compute costs) then the model must also be modifiable
> after training by a skilled person with tooling in the archive.

Thank you for articulating this!  How is that any different from my 2)?

> 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.

I don't see any real difference between the positions above.  Consider
replacing 'aren't important' in my definition with 'aren't source' to
see how they map.  In both situations, there would be some things (e.g.,
AI models) in 'main' that aren't licensed DFSG-compliant.  How to get
there seems mostly about changing the right definition of some words.
But maybe your position is enough different in that there are at least
three clear camps.

/Simon

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 1.2 KB)