I’ve noticed at least one app installed via F-Droid thay asked me to opt-in to on-device “AI”. Which made me curious about whether the F-Droid team has formulated a policy on this.
Are apps with on-device “AI” built from source by F-Droid volunteers, or are they Reproducible Builds? If it’s the latter, what’s the standard for reproducibility here?
I imagine the bar would be higher than in the watered down "Open Source AI Definition” that Mufelli pushed through the OSI. Which suggests a need for FSF or another uncaptured software freedom organisation to draft a libre AI definition. Teasing out how the FSD applies to generative models, and other forms of “AI” whose reproduction from source fundamentally depend on elements other than just their full code.
What about vibe coding? Cory Doctorow reports that all outputs of generative models are public domain by default. Subject to copyright only if a human author can prove substantial creative input. This creates a number of dark spots on the map we need to explore;
- Is auto-generated and therefore public domain software suitable for inclusion in F-Droid?
- If copyright is claimed on vibe coded software, is the author subject to copyleft licenses on code used to ”train” the model they used?
- If so, how would we determine whether that applies to Vibe App A?
- If we determine it does, which license applies?
Any model trained on GH code has ingested software under many incompatible licenses. Potentially including Source Available licenses like MongoDB’s SPPL.
- Does that mean software it produces is automatically under under the most restrictive license in the training data if someone claims authorship for copyright purposes?
- If there are multiple Source Available licenses in the “training” data, and they contradict, which applies?
BorgSoft have opened a huge can of worms here, and I doubt they’re going to like what comes out ; )
Also, Is there a need for a new anti-feature flag here? Something like “contains a generative model sometimes called’AI’. Or would that be excessive?
