Can "open source" software require a third party account and access token about if

[tildebyte]

You fundamentally misunderstand what "open source" means.

https://opensource.org/osd

Also, keep in mind that this repo may be open source, but there is no reason on Earth why the trained model (which is the thing which requires a token[1]) would necessarily have to be. You are free to take the source in this repo and train your own model, of course...

[1] How exactly do you think that storage and bandwidth for hosting many-multi-gigabyte models gets paid for? HuggingFace isn't a charity...

[marco-ve]

I think you misunderstand the spirit of open source. Yes, nowhere in that definition you linked to does it say that you can't make people fill out a form, or make them create an account, third party or otherwise. That doesn't mean it should necessarily be considered appropriate by the community to do so.

In fact, this is the first time I've encountered the use of huggingface authentication for a supposedly open source model. And contrary to your statement, Deep Floyd does advertise the model as open-source, as per the readme:

"We introduce DeepFloyd IF, a novel state-of-the-art open-source text-to-image model [...]"

Also, I don't see how requiring people to authenticate through a third party service addresses storage and bandwidth in any way. Huggingface isn't charging me for downloading the model. And they don't need the token to track how much bandwidth DeepFloyd are using, either. The only thing that requiring the auth token does is exert control and keep track of who is using the model. Which I believe fundamentally runs counter to the open source concept.

As a final note, I'm not sure the snarky and hostile tone in your response is appropriate on github. You may find people more receptive to your arguments if you present them in good faith.

[cornpo]

"The only thing that requiring the auth token does is exert control and keep track of who is using the model."

+1 for huggingface is weird and the "spaces" never, ever work. With safetensors https://pypi.org/project/python-qbittorrent/ would be fine.

[tildebyte]

The actaul model license in this repo (https://github.com/deep-floyd/IF/blob/develop/LICENSE-MODEL) specifically omits applying the term "open source" to the model

I'll also note that if you read the text presented when downloading IF for the first time, that it's still considered a research model, and thus isn't actually intended for use by the general public ("https://github.com/deep-floyd/IF/blob/develop/LICENSE-MODEL") - so, yes, HF is gatekeeping.

There are many things out there which violate the spirit of open source, but... open source, under capitalism, is a LEGAL concept, not an ethical one, and in fact it can easily be argued that the entire reason the concept exists in the first place is because people are not ethical in the main, unless coerced into being so