Re: Brief update about software freedom and artificial intelligence
Roberto A. Foglietta wrote:
> cloud technologies posed a challenge to the GPLv2 because under that
license everyone has the right to change the code but do not share it
as long as s/he uses it internally which is exactly how the SaaS
works. To fulfil this lack of freedom, the GPLv3 was proposed.
Well, not exactly.
If I am not mistaken, the GPLv3 was developed to clarify some
ambiguous language in the GPLv2, mostly with respect to patents. It
doesn't address SaaS -- you are still free to modify the code and keep
your modifications private, even if you run a publicly accessible
service on the modified code.
The Affero GPL <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html> was
developed to specifically address SaaS. This license requires that if
you run a service over a network, you must offer the corresponding
source code to all users of the service.
Charles Plessy wrote:
> Also, is there a DFSG-free license that forces the training dataset and
the result of the training process to be open source if a work under that
license is present in the training data? Would GPLv3 be sufficient?
As I understand, that is an open legal question. The Affero GPL would
be such a license *if* the training dataset would be considered part
of the code. While that does seem to make sense, as AI code is
essentially non-functional without the training, I am not aware that
there has ever been a pronouncement by a court of law that affirms or
denies it, nor I am aware of any free/open source license that
contains language that deals specifically with that issue, and I'm
pretty sure that there's lot of room for lawyers to argue their point.
If you explicitly publish a dataset under the GPL or AGPL, I suppose
that anybody who makes use of that dataset would be required to comply
with that. And if you don't explicitly license it at all, I suppose
that nobody would be authorized to use it except for "fair use". But
you must be careful or you might end up "licensing" your data without
even knowing. For example, I don't know the terms of service of
ChatGPT, but it seems a fair guess to assume that whatever you write
into it, you give them unlimited rights to use it. And that may easily
extend to whatever you write into a document processor or other
software that has a "feature" of "integrating" with ChatGPT, even if
you're running it on your own computer (I think I've read that even
LibreOffice is developing such a feature!).
Gerardo
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