Hacker News Reader

Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

The title says it's open source, but I couldn't actually see what the license is? (Maybe I missed it?)

And it looks like you have to download a torrent in order to get something. But yeah, it's missing a license and is still proprietary.

The torrent contains the parameters for another neural network, VGG16, that this network makes use of. VGG16 is a network developed by the Visual Geometry Group at Oxford[1]. They released their parameters under CC BY-NC 4.0 to save others from spending 2-3 weeks[2] training the network. Someone else converted those parameters to work with TensorFlow[3], which is what the torrent in this repository is.

I'm interested to see if neural network parameters become the new "binary blob". While in theory you could always retrain the network yourself, actually doing so takes a lot of work fiddling with the network's hyperparameters and requires significant computing resources.

[1] http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/very_deep/

[2] "On a system equipped with four NVIDIA Titan Black GPUs, training a single net took 2–3 weeks depending on the architecture." - arXiv:1409.1556

[3] https://github.com/ry/tensorflow-vgg16

It is open source. You can see the source. The license is no-license, so you can (only) fork it. That way, people can clone from your username instead of the original author, although that doesn't make any difference as they're all hosted on GitHub.

In some countries, code is copyrighted by default unless the author specifies a different license or explicitly puts it into the public domain. Without a license (or asking the author for permission), I have to assume this code is copyright & All Rights Reserved, and that I can't do anything with it except read it.

It's still interesting and cool to see! Just not what I thought it was when I clicked on the link.

Side note: "some countries" actually encompasses almost all the countries in the world, since source code falls under the Berne Convention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention, which automatically grants the author copyright on anything they make, unless they explicitly give it up...

You seem to be getting downvotes because you don't understand what the term "open source" means, but nobody has offered to explain so:

Open source does not just mean you can see the source. From Wikipedia[0]:

"Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

Not OP, but---I've been in software and OSS for a long time now, and I never knew this. I thought the term for that was Free Software.

In fact, looking closely at that definition, isn't practically nothing open source?

I.e. public domain? Any other license lives precisely to limit those rights of distribution, no?

Anyway, just pedantry. I see your point. Learn something new every day.

I think you've highlighted an inaccuracy, or at least a lack of clarity, in the Wikipedia article. I guess a Wikipedian could argue it should be interpreted as "for any purpose depending on the chosen licence", but that's definitely not clear.

Re: Open source vs Free software, this is a matter for debate (the tendency being too associate Free software with the more copyleft/viral/gnu-ish side of things), but I would definitely say that both involve explicit licencing, as opposed to potentially implicit " all rights reserved " style regional copyright.

I would usually use the term "FLOSS", for Free-Liberte, OSS"

The L part clarified the type of freedom, as the FL clarifies that it's not just OSS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com