Re: legal questions regarding machine learning models

[Mathieu Blondel <mathieu@mblondel.org>]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 5:51 AM, Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it> wrote:

>> Afterall, a model is just a big set of numbers.
>
> Machine code is just a long sequence of 0s and 1s...

I knew someone would come up with this :-)

Let me summarize and please correct me if I'm wrong.

* The model alone can be distributed under a free license.
- As a consequence of this, neither the original data nor the program
to build the model need to be free.

* The DFSG is more restrictive and requires the source of any software
in Debian.
- If you consider that the model is the source like it was accepted
for a picture which is a 2D rendering of a 3D model, then you can
package the model directly.

- Otherwise, it is necessary that the data are included in the source
package and the tools to build the model are in Debian main.
-> To cope with models which take too long to compute, it should be
possible to ship a pre-built architecture-independent model together
with the data. However this doesn't solve the problem that the data
may be too large to be hosted in the archive.
-> If data size becomes a problem, then one could resort to use the
non-free archive in order to ship the model only.

Thank you,
Mathieu Blondel