Simon Tournier writes:
Hi,
On lun., 18 mars 2024 at 12:38, Ian Eure
wrote:
They appear to be violating free software licenses on large
scale.
They are in violation of SWH’s own positions.
[...]
[1]: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.19173v1
[2]:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/starchat2-playground
[3]: https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigcode/the-stack-v2
[4]: https://github.com/bigcode-project/opt-out-v2/issues
Please note that Software Heritage folks are not co-author of
all that;
or I misread. Do not take me wrong, this is not an attempt to
escape
but a query for waiting the feedback of SWH.
Shit rolls downhill. It’s the least surprising thing in the world
to find that an "AI" company is violating licenses, because the
entire technology is based on infringement at a massive scale.
SWH’s partnership with, and promotion of, both the company and its
license-violating model, in violation of their *own stated
principles*, raises very legitimate questions.
There are multpile overlapping concerns here; personal,
organizational, legal, ethical, and technical.
From a personal, legal standpoint, HuggingFace is almost certainly
in violation of my code’s licenses. I will, therefore, work to
remove my code from their models. From a personal, ethical
standpoint, I believe that SWH has proven themselves untrustworthy
by enabling *and promoting* this infringement in violation of
their own stated policies, and will work to remove my code from
their archive. Personally, I cannot extend them the benefit of
the doubt on this. They blew it.
From an organizational ethical standpoint, Guix is IMO on the
right track by waiting on SWH (and perhaps pressuring them to fix
things). From an organizational, technical perspective, I would
like to see concrete measures to support my (and hundreds of
others’) personal, ethical desires to exclude software from SWH,
and by extension, HuggingFace’s models.
As Ludo said, SWH folks are, by the way, also long time Free
Software
activists.
In my view, this is not to their credit. I’d expect people
familiar with Free Software to be *more* sensitive to licensing
concerns, thus less likely to partner with a company likely to
violate them.
PS: Thanks for the detailed explanations. I will provide my
reading
later, after some concerns will be separated, eventually.
You’re very welcome.
Thanks,
— Ian
