Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> writes: > Answering Russ upthread, I understand very well how such a situation > will make us Debian people fell well, because we are not hosting it. But > I fail to say how this helps in delivering software freedom to our > users. First, they will have the models in question anyway, probably > automatically so we will really not be "protecting" them from this eveil > OSAID-but-not-DFSG-free stuff. (Or are we going to rule that free > software that does this cannot be in main too?)
> Second, it will be more work for our maintainers, and deliver an overall > worse experience in terms of security, mirroring, etc. > Finally, we will also be making things harder for people that are fine > with the limited modifications that are possible without the training > data (e.g., fine tuning) as they will not be able to find the full > sources (that are enough for their needs) within the Debian archive. But these are all arguments for merging non-free, or at the very least non-free-firmware, into main. There have always been good arguments for that. The proprietary NVIDIA drivers are quite important for people to be able to use their computer properly (thankfully hopefully becoming less so over time, but historically computers with NVIDIA graphics cards were nearly unusable without them, and they're still quite important for a lot of computing applications), and many of our users did not appreciate us "protecting" them from the drivers. If our primary goal was to make the most convenient distribution possible for our users, I think we would selectively include the most important non-free packages in main. It would be a better and more integrated user experience. I don't understand why machine learning models are any different. Or, rather, I understand why they're different to people who truly believe they really are free software. That argument makes sense to me; I just don't agree with it. But I don't understand the argument if one agrees that models without training data are non-free. Maybe the answer is that they're just too useful to the distribution to not package regardless of our opinions about whether they're free software. User experience and free software principles *are* often in tension and it's fine for us to shift that balance, in my opinion. But I guess I would have expected us to do that via a mechanism similar to non-free-firmware if we wanted to make it easy for users to use software that is OSAID-approved but not DFSG-free, at least if we have a lot of it. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
