Re: Concerns to software freedom when packaging deep-learning based appications.

Hi Lumin,

Quoting Lumin (2018-07-12 14:35:24)
> My core concern is:
> 
>   Even if upstream releases their pretrained model under GPL license, 
>   the freedom to modify, research, reproduce the neural networks, 
>   especially "very deep" neural networks is de facto controled by 
>   PROPRIETARIES.
> 
> Justification to the concern:
> 
>   1. CUDA/cuDNN is used by nearly all deep-learning researchers and
>      service providers.
> 
>   2. Deep neural networks is extremely hard to train on CPU due to the 
>      time cost. By leveraging cuDNN and powerful graphic cards, the 
>      training process can be boosted up to more than 100x times 
>      faster. That means, for example if a neural network can be 
>      trained by GPU in 1 day, then the same thing would take a few 
>      months on CPU. (Google's TPU and FPGA are not the point here)
> 
>   3. A meaningful "modification" to neural network often refers to 
>      "fine-tune", which is a similar process to "training". A 
>      meaningful "reproduce" of neural network often refers to 
>      "training starting from random initialization".
> 
>   4. Due to 1. 2. and 3. , the software freedom is not complete. In a 
>      pure freesoftware environment, that work cannot be reproduced, 
>      modified, or even researched. Although CPU indeed can finish the 
>      same work in several months or several years, but that's way too 
>      much reluctant.
> 
>      In this way, the pretrained neural network is not totally "free" 
>      even if it is licenced under GPL-*. None of the clauses in GPL is 
>      violated, but the software freedom is limited.

Perhaps I am missing something, but if _possible_ just 100x slower to 
use CPUs instead of GPUs, then I fail to recognize how it cannot be 
reproduced, modified, and researched 100x slower.

Quite interesting question you raise!


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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