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by magicalhippo 974 days ago
The quake engine is still open source even though it doesn't come with the quake game assets, no?

It seems unreasonable to require the training data just to be called open source, given it has similar copyright challenges as game assets.

Of course, this wouldn't make the model reproducible. But that's different from open source.
2 comments
darkwater 974 days ago
Good example. And in fact you are calling the "engine" opensource, not the whole Quake game. The 'assets" in most "opensource" AI models are not available.
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EGreg 974 days ago
Imagine if the Telegram client was open source but not the backend.

Imagine if Facebook open-sourced their front-end libraries like React but not the back-end.

Imagine if Twitter or Google didn’t publish its Algorithm for how they rank things to display to different people.

You don’t need to imagine. That’s exactly what’s happening! Would you call them open source because their front end is open source? Could you host your own back end on your choice of computers?

No. That’s why I even started https://qbix.com/platform

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darkwater 973 days ago
I completely agree with you (and the example you mention are singled out in the "antifeatures" list in F-Droid, to name an example)
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torginus 974 days ago
It's a bit different - here most of the value lies in the weights.

A better analogy would be some graphics card drivers which ship a massive proprietary GPU firmware blob, and a small(ish) kernel shim to talk with said blob.

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magicalhippo 973 days ago
Well perhaps we can consider this a kind of short-sightedness of Stallmann. His point with GPL and the free software movement, as I understand it, was to ensure the user could continue to use the software regardless of what the software author decided to do.

Sometimes though the software alone can be near useless without additional assets that aren't necessarily covered by the code license.

Like Quake, having the engine without the assets is useless if what you wanted was to play Quake the game. Neural nets are another prime example, as you mention. Simulators that rely on measured material property databases for usable results also fall into this category, and so on.

So perhaps what we need is new open source licenses that includes the assets needed for the user to be able to reasonably use the program as a whole.

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