Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilc | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations to the Grid team on the fundraise and the announcement! Exciting stuff.

It seems like there is an emerging consensus that (a) DL development requires access to massive compute, but (b) if you’re only using off-the-shelf PyTorch or TensorFlow, moving your model from your personal development environment to a cluster or cloud setting is too difficult — it is easy to spend most of your time managing infrastructure rather than developing models. At Determined AI, we’ve spent the last few years building an open source DL training platform that tries to make that process a lot simpler (https://github.com/determined-ai/determined), but I think it's fair to say that this is still very much an open space and an important problem. Curious to take a look at Grid AI and see how it compares to other tools in the space -- some other alternatives include Kubeflow, Polyaxon, and Spell AI.

View on HN

Just to be 100% clear.

We want people to build on Lightning and we want companies to deliver value and products for their users.

We place no limitations on how Lightning is use or what products people will build.

Our in-process patent portfolio is not to limit the use of lightning in any way but for defensibility purposes only.

If you have any other inquiries please email legal@pytorchlightning.ai for more details.

maybe determined should come up with its own API instead of copying Lightning's :)

Not a nice move for the opensource spirit. Also, pretty sure it's a violation of our patent and 100% copyright infringement.

Hi William -- we have absolutely not copied any of Lightning's APIs.

In fact, our PyTorch API makes some significantly different design choices than Lightning does -- e.g., we require users to step optimizers and run the backward pass explicitly, which is a bit lower-level but allows for more flexibility when using the API.

For instance, here is an example of a GAN using our PyTorch API: https://github.com/determined-ai/determined/blob/master/exam...

This is a port of this PyTorch Lightning example: https://github.com/PyTorchLightning/pytorch-lightning/blob/m...

Despite the former being a port of the latter, there are significant differences between the two APIs.

More broadly, we welcome competition in this space and think there's a lot that we can all learn from one another.

Projects copying from each other is exactly in the open source spirit. Don't release something with an Apache License if you don't want people copying it with compatible licenses. Also, patents of open source software (to limit uses that the license would otherwise allow) and API copyrights are pretty strongly frowned upon in the open source community. As a note, the Apache license you released Lightning under grants patent lawsuit protection to anyone using your code under the license so claiming copyright and patent infringement on another Apache licensed project seems amazingly skeevy.

If this is the philosophical stance that Grid and Lightning are taking then it's definitely a project I'm going to advice people to stay well clear off. It's the worst flavor of commercialized open source software and potentially a legal liability to touch in any way as you seem way too lawsuit trigger happy.

No! we want people to build on Lightning and we want companies to deliver value and products for their users.

The Apache License you released Lightning under explicitly allows people to clone your framework if they adhere to the license and provides them patent protection if they do so.