Posted by mkl 5 days ago
If Llama released everything that the most zealous opponents of weights=source demand they release under the same license that they're currently offering the weights under, we'd still be left with something that falls cleanly into the category of Source Available. It's a generous Source Available, but removes many of the freedoms that are part of both the Open Source and Free Software Definitions.
Fighting over weights vs source implicitly cedes the far more important ground in the battle over the soul of FOSS, and that will have ripple effects across the industry in ways that ceding weights=source never would.
Once we've resolved the problem of using the word "Open" incorrectly I'm happy to have a conversation about what should be the preferred form for modification (i.e. source) of an LLM. But that is the less important and far more esoteric discussion (and one about which reasonable people can and do disagree), to the point where it's merely a distraction from the incredibly meaningful and important problem of calling something "Open Source" while attaching an Acceptable Use policy to it.
I don't think this is true. If someone said "look, my software is open source" and by "source" they meant the binary they shipped, the specific definition of "open" they chose to use would not matter much for the sort of things I'd like to do with an open source project. Both are important.
If they released the binary as "Open Source" but had a long list of things I wasn't allowed to do with it, the fact that they didn't release the source code would be of secondary concern to the fact that they're calling it "Open" while it actually has a trail of legal landmines waiting to bite anyone who tries to use it as free software.
And that's with a clear cut case like a binary-only release. With an LLM there's a lot of room for debate about what counts as the preferred form for making modifications to the work (or heck, what even counts as the work). That question is wide open for debate, and it's not worth having that debate when there's a far more egregious problem with their usage.
The closest thing to open source would be to have open training data. The weights are the binary, the training date is the source and the process of getting the weights is the compilation process.
Fintuning or whatever is just modding the binaries. Remixing different layers is creating a workflow pipeline by combining different functions of a binary software package together with components from other binary software packages.
Common misconception. Weights are not binary. Weights are hardcoded values that you load into an (open-source or closed-source) engine and you run that engine. The source code for LLMs is both in the architecture (i.e. what to do with those hardcoded values) and the inference engines.
As opposed to binaries, you can modify weights. You can adjust them, tune them for downstream tasks and so on. And more importantly, in theory you the downloader and "company x" the releaser of the model use the same methods and technologies to modify the weights. (in contrast to a binary release where you can only modify only the machine language while the creator can modify the source-code and recompile).
LLamas aren't open source because the license under which they're released isn't open source. There are plenty of models that are open source tho: mistrals (apache 2.0), qwens (apache2.0), deepseeks (mit), glms (mit) and so on.
additionally modifying data in binary form was a longtime practice last time I looked, but I might not remember correctly.
> With respect to any multimodal models included in Llama 4, the rights granted under Section 1(a) of the Llama 4 Community License Agreement are not being granted to you if you are an individual domiciled in, or a company with a principal place of business in, the European Union. This restriction does not apply to end users of a product or service that incorporates any such multimodal models.
This is especially strange considering that Llama 3.2 also was multimodal, yet to my knowledge there was no such restriction.
In any case, at least Huggingface seems to be collecting these details now – see for example https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Inst...
Curious to see what Ollama will do.
Thank you, also for that article – the tabular summary of changes across the two is great!
Any idea what standing Meta/Llama thinks they have when they write stuff like that?
Is it copyright law? Do they think llama4 is copyright them? Is it something else?
It's the same reason a lot of websites block the EU rather than risk being sued under the GDPR.
The GDPR can absolutely be applied to foreign companies https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/ but even if it couldn't, Facebook is an Irish company specifically so they can avoid American taxes. I do not think the EU will have any problem with jurisdiction.
I don't think they care. I'm pretty sure Llama itself trained on a bunch of copyrighted data. Have licence agreements actually mattered?
They want to have their cake and eat it though and these companies are all lobbying hard in a political system with open bribery.
But is that how it works? Not implying that the situation is otherwise comparable, but you e.g. can't ignore the GPL that a copyrighted piece of code is made available to you under, just because "you didn't agree to it".
As I see it (as a non-lawyer), either model weights are copyrightable (then Meta's license would likely be enforceable), or they aren't, but then even "agreeing to the license" shouldn't be able to restrict what you can do with them.
In other words, I'd consider it a very strange outcome if Meta could sue licensees for breach of contract for their use of the weights, but not non-licensees, if the license itself only covers something that Meta doesn't even have exclusive rights to in the first place. (Then again, stranger decisions have been made around copyright.)
If the model weights cannot be copyrighted, you are not violating copyright law by duplicating them in the absence of a license grant, so you gain no benefit in entering into a contract by agreeing to the license.
You can sidestep this by just downloading someone else's quantisation / fine tune.
[1] https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Inst...
Imagine you find a printed copy of "Moby Dick". On the first page, you see the statement: "By reading this work, you are entering into a legally binding contract, obligating you to not spoil the ending to anybody under penalty of $100, payable as a charitable donation to NYPL."
Can whoever printed the (out of copyright) book sue you if you spoil the ending and don't make the donation? Would things change if you were to sign the first page with your name?
Not true either for a digital book. However, since you are in possession of a digital copy of something that is definitely copyrightable, you have two options to defend yourself and not go to jail: either use the license terms that give you the digital rights to the book (and pay the $100), or not have a license, not have a defense, and let the judge decide what the penalty should be. Will it be more than $100?
I'm not so sure they do, and even if they did so what? Holding the copyright on some of the data being used in the model doesn't mean they hold the copyright on the model.
> They want to have their cake and eat it
Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans.
Every good, "SotA" model is trained on copyrighted data. This fact becomes aparent when models are released with everything public (i.e. training data) and they score significantly behind in every benchmark.
prob got a sub...
https://ssrc-static.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/OpenAI-Traini...
Of course you probably don’t have enough money to get a ruling on this question, just wanted to point out that (afaik) it is up for debate. Maybe you should just avoid clicking on license agreement buttons, if you can.
Does Google have copyright of their search index? Never tested, as far as I know.
There's definitely copyright when you ask the model to spit out Chapter 3 of a Harry Potter book and it literally gives it to you verbatim (Which I've gotten it to do with the right prompts). There's no world where the legal system gives Meta a right to license out content that never belonged to them in the first place.
What's not clear is whether or not the model weights infringe the copyright of the works they were trained on.
Did you have any meaningful hand in constructing the contents?
> One example where this requirement wasn't violated, is on build.nvidia.com
But built with llama isn't shown prominently, so this is actually an example of a violation of the license.
Seriously, I genuinely wonder what the purpose of adding random unenforceable licenses to code/binaries. Meta knows people don’t read license agreements, so if they’re not interested in enforcing a weird naming convention, why stipulate it at all?
Funnily enough, Gemma 3 also probably isn't "open source" if you have a previous understanding of what that is and means, they have their own "Gemma Terms of Use" which acts as the license. See https://ollama.com/library/gemma2/blobs/097a36493f71 for example.