Re: Question to all candidates: How do you feel about OSI, FSF and LF? (and Debian while we're at it (and AI if you want to))
On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 07:48:39AM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> Dear DPL candidates
>
> (As always, answer as little or much as you want)
>
> How do you feel about organisations such as the Open Source Initiative, Free
> Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation?
The OSI's recent initiative about Open Source AI definition and the
handling of the board election have been hugely problematic and suffice
it to say I am not a fan of it.
WRT the FSF, I share the position of the FSFE in that I see myself
unable to collaborate with any organisation where RMS has a leading
position.
The Linux foundation to me feels like a group of corporations working
towards a common goal, rather than a group of people working towards the
greater good.
>
> We have two candidates who have mentioned their intent to collaborate more
> closely with Ubuntu, but should we also be doing more to collaborate with
> these?
I don't think we should broadly collaborate with the FSF or OSI until
the social problems are resolved.
I can't say much about the Linux foundation.
That being said, this should not limit people from engaging with other
individual projects hosted in these groups, but it's more a question of
issuing joint statements, or announcing projects in like press releases
and things like that.
>
> In cases where our goals start to diverge from these organisations (or more
> accurately, when their goals start to diverge from ours, but bah! I don't
> want to lead the question too much), should we be paying attention? Or even
> take action?
Most of the decisions that don't directly affect us we don't really need
to care about. Take the Open Source AI definition, we will need to
establish our own definition of what is a DFSG-free AI; but we need to
do that regardless of what OSI defines.
Other matters of the day will be taken care of by GR; like the issue of
RMS was. We may end up just voting not to issue statements in the end,
but having a structured way to reach the decision is helpful.
>
> And pointing the finger to ourselves, how well do you think the Debian
> Social contract and DFSG holds up? As a DPL candidate, do you think there's
> anything substantially missing?
>
> https://www.debian.org/social_contract
>
> Do you think that there are there ways we could do better at those promises
> and be a better Debian?
I think we're doing OK, but we do need to answer the challenges posed by
AI models and output of AI models. Notably, whether an AI model can be
shipped by Debian, and whether output of AI models can be shipped by
Debian.
But also this is not a really new problem, I'm sure we're already
shipping a lot of invalidly licensed code that just got lifted from
StackOverflow.
>
> And another bonus question. How do you feel about the general concept of
> free software going forward? Is it something that is growing / embraced by
> the world (big corporations, software companies, etc), or is the trend to
> nerf it and trend towards models such as open-core and exploit it as far as
> possible?
The trend seems to be moving towards permissively licensed products,
which I am not a significant fan of. Many of the hugely important
projects like OpenWRT or mobile Linux OS are only possible because Linux
is GPL licensed, and as corporations shift further towards permissively
licensed models and locked down devices, we lose the ability to tinker
with said devices.
>
> And another because I'm supposed to be driving to work and it's more fun to
> type questions than to sit in traffic... how do you feel about how AI is
> going? Massive corporations are scraping and processing vast amounts of work
> in the commons that gets regurgitated as new and original code. Where do you
> stand on this, both ethically and in the context of the future of projects
> like Debian?
The AI crawlers are operating in botnets to try to evade detection, and
in turn DDoS websites, and someone should really go to prison there.
The data centers being built eat up more energy than anything before it,
it's like they don't care about climate goals anymore and now just want
to bet everyone's life on AI figuring out a revolutionary new solution
to fix climate change. Sigh.
All these AI products have not yielded any meaningful results, only FUD,
and are becoming a danger to our society and freedom. Heck, I recall
reading that a study found that people put more trust in (wrong) ChatGPT
answers than in studied experts.
I've previously said that it's not clear to me which AIs are free
software and how output from an AI can be licensed. I think that's
a more fundamental problem for Debian, but also as mentioned, the
case of people stealing other people's code isn't exactly new, it's
just automated now.
--
debian developer - deb.li/jak | jak-linux.org - free software dev
ubuntu core developer i speak de, en
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