Re: Overinterpretation of DFSG? QR code for receiving donation is non-free???
Mo Zhou <lumin@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2020 at 10:37:07AM +0200, Gard Spreemann wrote:
>> Or, another example that I can imagine plausibly arising in practice:
>> suppose a terrabyte of raw data was collected from a scientific
>> experiment or simulation in order to produce (among other things) a plot
>> in the form of a 100 KB image that it is useful to distribute in
>> documentation that goes along with some DFSG-free code. Clearly the
>> "preferred form of modification" is the raw data, together with the code
>> that processed it, but it seems unpractical to expect the maintainer to
>> go through a laborious process that perhaps even requires highly
>> specialized expertise in order to distribute the raw data and reassemble
>> the plot from it.
>
> In this case I agree that distributing the resulting image as is, is the
> sensible thing to do. Another thing came up in my mind, quite
> interesting, is that if the resulting product is a pre-trained neural
> network, I get completely reversed conclusion ...
>
> Further, some neural networks are trained from the wikipedia dump
> (CC-licensed). Are we uploading wikipedia dumps to the archive when our
> users need to use these models?
>
> What's the essential difference between a jpg picture and a pretrained
> neural network then? They are both multi-dimensional numerical arrays
> from an abstract perspective, but a normal human can understand and
> modify the picture pixels, while not being able to understand or modify
> the network prarameters.
Indeed. So we have a situation where there's 100% DFSG free code, 100%
DFSG free data, and 100% DFSG free output produced with those, using
perhaps vast and expensive computational resources. It seems to me to be
a bit of a shame if this overinterpretation of the DFSG, or perhaps the
lack of an update to the DFSG to account for this reality, would mean
said output cannot be distributed and duplicated for the greater good in
Debian.
-- Gard
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