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Is a .rom file open source because you can pipe it into an emulator and generate new machine code for a different platform? I don't think your argument holds a
by smolder 2y ago
Is a .rom file open source because you can pipe it into an emulator and generate new machine code for a different platform?
I don't think your argument holds any water.
- lolinder 2y agoIs a .rom file the preferred form for modifying the work?
- smolder 2y agoTo get it to run on different platforms and gain new features like super-resolution and so on, yes. Rom files are the preferred form for modifying old games. No one bothers digging up old source code and assets to reconstruct things when they can use an emulator to essentially spit out a derivative binary with new capability. See every re-release of a 16 bit era or earlier game. Now that I've beat my head against this issue for a while, I think it's best summed up as: weights are a binary artifact, not source of any kind.
- lolinder 2y agoIf what you say is true—if the ROM is the preferred form for making modifications (even for the original company that produced it) and the ROM is released under a FOSS license—then sure, I have no problem calling it open source.
- grandma_tea 2y agoPreferred by who? It sounds like these people have a strong say in what constitutes open source.
- lolinder 2y agoPreferred by anyone who's actually using and modifying the work. No one trains an existing model from scratch, even those who have access to all of the data to do so. There's just no compelling reason to retrain a model to make a change when you have the weights already—fine tuning is preferred by everyone. The only people I've seen who've asserted otherwise are random commenters on the internet who don't really understand the tech.
- grandma_tea 2y ago> Preferred by anyone who's actually using and modifying the work. > ...fine tuning is preferred by everyone How do you know this? Did you take a survey? When? What if preferences change or there is no consensus? > The only people I've seen who've asserted otherwise are random commenters on the internet who don't really understand the tech. There are lots of things that can be done with the training set that don't involve retraining the entire model from scratch. As a random example, I could perform a statistical analysis over a portion of the training set and find a series of vectors in token-space that could be used to steer the model. Something like this can be done without access to the training data, but does it work better? We don't know because it hasn't been tried yet. But none of that really matters, because what we're discussing is the philosophy of open source. I think it's a really bad take to say that something is open source because it's in a "preferred" format.
- lolinder 2y ago> I think it's a really bad take to say that something is open source because it's in a "preferred" format. Preferred form and under a free license. Llama isn't open source, but that's because the license has restrictions. As for if it's a bad take that the preferred form matters—take it up with the GPL, I'm just using their definition: > The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.