Re: Concerns/questions around Software Heritage Archive

[Ian Eure <ian@retrospec.tv>]

Hello,

I’m following up on this since discussion since it’s been a month 
and I haven’t heard any updates.

Summarizing the situation:

- SHF has an opaque, difficult, and undocumented process for 
  handling name changes.  I’s like to stress again that this is 
  *not* strictly a transgender issue (though it likely affects 
  them more, or in worse/different ways) -- it is a human respect 
  issue.  Many, many more cisgender people change their name than 
  transgender people.

- SHF gave their archive to HuggingFace, an "AI" company which is 
  generating derived works with no attribution or provenance, in 
  ways which violate the both licenses of the projects used to 
  train their model, and the SHF principles for LLMs.

- HuggingFace wasn’t respecting requests to opt-out of their 
  model.


On the first point, it sounds like SHF has made concrete progress 
to improve[1], which is very good to hear.  If SHF continues on 
this course, I think the concern is resolved.

On the third point, HuggingFace has begun honoring opt-out 
requests, but is still very far behind.  Also, they don’t remove 
code from the older versions of their model -- it remains there 
forever.  This is progress, but still, not great.

On the second point, I have not seen any public statements 
indicating that either SHF or HuggingFace even acknowledges the 
problem.  SHF’s most recent newsletter[2], published in April 2024 
(after these concerns came to light), continues to tout that 
StarCoder2 is "the first AI model aligned with our principles," 
which appears to be false.  StarCoder2 includes both licensed and 
unlicensed code, and HuggingFace’s own StarChat2 playground 
produces works derivative of this code, with no attribution or 
licensing information.  There is also no statement or position on 
the SHF news blog.  Nor hsa HuggingFace either fixed their tools, 
or made a statement.  This is still very much a live concern.

I have a few questions:

- Has Guix reached out to SHF to express these concerns / get a 
  response?
- Whether a public or private response, what would Guix consider 
  to be an acceptable response?  An unacceptable respoinse?
- How long is Guix willing to wait for a response?

Thanks,

  — Ian

[1]: 
https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/5273879-they-are-fixing-some
[2]: 
https://www.softwareheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Software-Heritage-2024-Vision-Milestones-Newsletter.pdf

Ian Eure <ian@retrospec.tv> writes:

> Hi Guixy people,
>
> I’d never heard of SWH before I started hacking on Guix last 
> fall, and
> it struck me as rather a good idea.  However, I’ve seen some 
> things
> lately which have soured me on them.
>
> They appear to be using the archive to build LLMs:
> https://www.softwareheritage.org/2024/02/28/responsible-ai-with-starcoder2/
>
> I was also distressed to see how poorly they treated a developer 
> who
> wished to update their name:
> https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/4968198-the-software-heritag
> https://cohost.org/arborelia/post/5052044-the-software-heritag
>
> GPL’d software I’ve created has been packaged for Guix, which I 
> assume
> means it’s been included in SWH.  While I’m dealing with their 
> (IMO:
> unethical) opt-out process, I likely also need to stop new 
> copies from
> being uploaded again in the future.
>
> Is there a way to indicate, in a Guix package, that it should 
> *never*
> be included in SWH?
>
> Is there a way to tell Guix to never download source from SWH?
>
> I want absolutely nothing to do with them.
>
> Thanks,
>
>  — Ian
>