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France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

social.numerique.gouv.fr

21–30 of 232 posts

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#22

Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto

I think it's more a guideline principle for public software, for exemple apps that are used by citizens to declare taxes, renews IDs...

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#23
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call data "source", whether a book, a sound track, video, etc. In my view of the world, the code to train, the software to run, that's open source joy. Now... should the trained, and vectored data be free? Maybe so. But I bet this UN thing doesn't cover that.

I didn't call the data the source and in the past have explicitly argued that training data is not necessary to exercise the freedoms normally associated with open source. Llama models have usage restrictions that go against any mainstream definitions of open source.

The model is part of the data, agreed?

Anyhow, I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth, simply stating my thoughts. And I focused on data because I see OSS code everywhere, so presume there is no issue there.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#24
This does not surprise me. I've had the sense that the French government has been really forward in open source thinking since my interactions with ETAlab back in 2017. They were tracking some really bleeding edge civic tech stuff before anyone else was (including g0v.tw and the vTaiwan project)

https://g0v.tw/intl/en/

https://info.vtaiwan.tw

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#25
This makes total sense. When a country is creating public software, it should be open source by default. This is the only way to create trust. In the long run, open source and closed source government software will probably differentiate dictatorships from democracies

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#26

Real question is whether this is just symbolic or if the French state will actually redirect procurement pipelines + vendor mandates around these principles. i'd be more impressed if this came bundled with policy teeth, e.g. requiring all software vendors to deliver open-by-default interfaces or pushing funding toward open infra maintenance. Otherwise it's hardly much more than a manifesto

It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#27
Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#28
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.comparia.beta.gouv.fr/modeles compares models and Llama different licenses are not mislabeled as "open source". Also, https://opensource.org/ai/endorsements shows code.gouv.fr in the list.

Cool, thanks! Cette licence permet d'utiliser, reproduire, modifier et distribuer librement le code avec attribution, mais impose des restrictions pour les opérations dépassant 700 millions d'utilisateurs mensuels. Interesting they only mention the 700 million users thing and not the other restrictions on use. Personally I could regard the prohibition against basically Google and Microsoft using it to be a minor tran…

It's actually targeting Apple since both Google and Microsoft have their own models.

Re: France Endorses UN Open Source Principles

#30

Does anyone know what Mercedes-Benz is doing? I can see why many of the others are on the endorsement list but this one seems out of place. I'm not a car nerd though so I'm sure there is something I'm really missing and be interested in learning about.

They have an entire webpage/associated github repository. It doesn't seem like they've published anything terribly well-known, but good on them for releasing some tooling

https://opensource.mercedes-benz.com/projects/

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