Posted by Brajeshwar 10/26/2024
personally, I think the term should be avoided if its not what the open source community has made a culture around
but I cant say its weasely corporate “open washing”, either. because its the open source community that appropriated the term to mean a subset of free, open, commercial use licenses and everything digital thats necessary to replicate the product, not the other way around where corporations are suddenly using some legalese to turn it into a marketing term thats technically okay
One can debate "clear" but the the AI Act https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj does say in Recitals 102-104 (mini open source license definition *highlighted*):
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(102) Software and data, including models, released under a free and open-source licence that allows them to be openly shared and where users can freely access, use, modify and redistribute them or modified versions thereof, can contribute to research and innovation in the market and can provide significant growth opportunities for the Union economy. General-purpose AI models released under free and open-source licences should be considered to ensure high levels of transparency and openness if their parameters, including the weights, the information on the model architecture, and the information on model usage are made publicly available. *The licence should be considered to be free and open-source also when it allows users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software and data, including models under the condition that the original provider of the model is credited, the identical or comparable terms of distribution are respected.*
(103) Free and open-source AI components covers the software and data, including models and general-purpose AI models, tools, services or processes of an AI system. Free and open-source AI components can be provided through different channels, including their development on open repositories. For the purposes of this Regulation, AI components that are provided against a price or otherwise monetised, including through the provision of technical support or other services, including through a software platform, related to the AI component, or the use of personal data for reasons other than exclusively for improving the security, compatibility or interoperability of the software, with the exception of transactions between microenterprises, should not benefit from the exceptions provided to free and open-source AI components. The fact of making AI components available through open repositories should not, in itself, constitute a monetisation.
(104) The providers of general-purpose AI models that are released under a free and open-source licence, and whose parameters, including the weights, the information on the model architecture, and the information on model usage, are made publicly available should be subject to exceptions as regards the transparency-related requirements imposed on general-purpose AI models, unless they can be considered to present a systemic risk, in which case the circumstance that the model is transparent and accompanied by an open-source license should not be considered to be a sufficient reason to exclude compliance with the obligations under this Regulation. In any case, given that the release of general-purpose AI models under free and open-source licence does not necessarily reveal substantial information on the data set used for the training or fine-tuning of the model and on how compliance of copyright law was thereby ensured, the exception provided for general-purpose AI models from compliance with the transparency-related requirements should not concern the obligation to produce a summary about the content used for model training and the obligation to put in place a policy to comply with Union copyright law, in particular to identify and comply with the reservation of rights pursuant to Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council (40).
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In the articles open-source is expressly referred to as release under an open-soruce license (see definition in recitals above):
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[Article 2: Scope]
12. This Regulation does not apply to AI systems released under free and open-source licences, unless they are placed on the market or put into service as high-risk AI systems or as an AI system that falls under Article 5 or 50.
[Article 25: Responsibilities along the AI value chain]
4. The provider of a high-risk AI system and the third party that supplies an AI system, tools, services, components, or processes that are used or integrated in a high-risk AI system shall, by written agreement, specify the necessary information, capabilities, technical access and other assistance based on the generally acknowledged state of the art, in order to enable the provider of the high-risk AI system to fully comply with the obligations set out in this Regulation. This paragraph shall not apply to third parties making accessible to the public tools, services, processes, or components, other than general-purpose AI models, under a free and open-source licence.
[Article 54: Authorised representatives of providers of general-purpose AI models]
6. The obligation set out in this Article shall not apply to providers of general-purpose AI models that are released under a free and open-source licence that allows for the access, usage, modification, and distribution of the model, and whose parameters, including the weights, the information on the model architecture, and the information on model usage, are made publicly available, unless the general-purpose AI models present systemic risks.
Externally done to give a kick to sales efforts.
And internally done in an attempt to get someone with AI resources to build blatantly non-AI functions by sticking then onto something with no or very little genuine AI angle.
It's just a very wide category that is basically meaningless nowadays because it applies to everything.
Marketers are even restrained in using it, because applying it everywhere it could go would sound insane and cringe. But it is a technical term, that technically applies to all those things people put it on.
This is historical revisionism, and it's especially terrible that you'd call people "weasels" for correcting it. The term "open source" (as applied to software) was in-use prior to the existence of the OSI, and that's explicitly why the OSI wasn't able to obtain a trademark on the term. The term meant something roughly equivalent to how we use "source available" today.
Read https://dieter.plaetinck.be/posts/open-source-undefined-part... for a really good deep-dive into the prior usage of the term.
It's not my blog post, so you don't have to take my word for it. But if you disagree with that post author's findings, perhaps you could indicate what you disagree with. The post extensively links citations/sources.
> does this make it reasonable to claim, today, that we can call something “Open Source” if it isn’t OSI-approved?
OSI isn't the boss of me, and I see no reason to let them dictate the meaning of terminology that they didn't invent and don't hold a trademark for. The two main founders of OSI also haven't been involved with it for quite some time, and besides, one of them regularly makes politically-charged comments that I find repulsive. Why exactly are we putting this random small non-profit on a pedestal?
Personally, I stick to "source available" when referring to non-OSI licenses, but that's strictly to avoid getting shouted at by people who inexplicably treat the OSD like a holy law from the almighty. I think the industry would be a lot healthier if we avoided these extreme views.
> Only weasels try to claim otherwise; i.e. the only people I see doing it are weasels who are trying to defend the indefensible by arguing the definition of words.
It sure sounds like you think anyone who disagrees with your point of view is a weasel, even if they have a well-researched reason for the disagreement!
Even if there were some usage of “Open Source” prior to the OSI, the OSI announcement and consequent media storm completely obliterated any prior meaning the term might have had.
> OSI isn't the boss of me
What reason can you have to use the term “Open Source” today to mean something other than what OSI defines, other than to weaselly mislead?
In any case, OSI didn't create this term, they were denied a trademark on it, and they didn't actually create any of these licenses. They aren't the government, and they aren't the dictionary. The default state of affairs is to not care about their definition. You need to give reasons why we should care about their arbitrary definition. A "media storm" is just a marketing campaign, and that hardly seems like a good reason for an entire industry to strictly follow something.
I'm especially disturbed by how some strict adherents of the OSD seem to go out of their way to attack non-FOSS licenses and the software authors who adopt them. The negative comments on the recent Fair Source threads here seem to indicate that any attempt to adopt non-OSD source-available licensing will be attacked as "open washing", even if the authors don't use the word "open".
I don't understand why people feel justified to act as self-appointed Terminology Police on behalf of an arbitrary definition from a random small nonprofit. This is cult-like behavior.
There can be less genetic differences between people from (for example) Asia and Africa vs actual family members.
But feel like the intent of the word was very much not vague. It was initially just about the optical differences between people that were born in different areas of the world - which are/were very easy to discern ~150 yrs ago when it extremely rare for "interracial" offspring.
But that's mostly down to people being people and not caring about these differences at large. Give it a few hundred years and these physical differences such as skin color, average body sizes etc will have gone away, too. At least I think they will.
So I feel that this is a great example of another word that's become so charged with political meaning that the origins meaning has been lost or at least changed along the way. And it continues to lose it with every kid that has parents of varying origin