What would be the incentive for a person, not a company, to pay Stability AI company instead of downloading and doing a bit of setup to have their own uncensored model?
I do not know the details, but based on the fact that some of the orgs involved in the project literally exists to democratise ai, I believe that many of the stake holders in that project were adamant about open sourcing it.
In this case they were actually the first to the punch(along with openAI)!
In fact, I know of a huge company that does all their research in the EU, where they can get gov't funding, but then the process to turn them into products is in the US (less regulation, larger market).
So lots of highly talented people just do open source in their free time or work at universities.
> As mentioned earlier,[MIR](Sec. 21) when only consulting surveys from the Anglosphere, it is not always clear[DLC] that Deep Learning was first conceived outside of it. It started in 1965 in the Ukraine (back then the USSR) with the first nets of arbitrary depth that really learned.[DEEP1-2][R8] Soon afterwards, multilayer perceptrons learned internal representations through stochastic gradient descent in Japan.[GD1-2a] A few years later, modern backpropagation was published in Finland (1970).[BP1] The basic deep convolutional NN architecture (now widely used) was invented in the 1970s in Japan[CNN1] where NNs with convolutions were later (1987) also combined with "weight sharing" and backpropagation.[CNN1a]
Metabase is another company I knew where they do this, but I don't know how successful they are (their hosting costs start at "way too high considering how easy the thing is to spin up", which was great for me at $PREV_JOB I suppose but)
I'd suspect the moment you touch anything with external auditing, it looks better to say "we've got a fully paid up support contract from the vendor" than "we're running v1.23.456-ubuntu-patch-357-with-chives-and-salsa that we downloaded last week."
None of which are profitable
Things like "ok, we can't use one drive - need a different tool," "can't use Sharepoint, need to use a different tool," and so on.
The market is there. RHEL and similar are well established.
In order to make this a "we should do this" either government IT funding needs to be significantly increased (that is difficult in the current political climate in most places) or the support offerings and staff needed for the average user (using Windows, Sharepoint, Word, Excel, Teams, and Project) needs to be competitive with the pricing that Microsoft offers.
That should be "simple" - make a company that offers the same level of support as Microsoft does for a packaged suite of software that includes easy installations, appropriately locked down desktops, call center, and so on.
And if that can't be found at the same price that Microsoft offers - then we return to the "increase government funding."
Saying "we should outlaw government spending on closed source" misses a lot of the tools out there that are needed to keep things running. Is there a FOSS (with support contracts for the stack) alternative to Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS? And that's not even getting deep at all into the niche SaaS tools that some pieces use for specific problems.
The market is there and state and local governments would likely jump at the opportunity to switch if there's a company that can offer the same functional stack with the same support for the same price or cheaper built on top of FOSS. Otherwise... persuade those state and local governments to staff up to the necessary levels to be able to hire people able to customize and support the FOSS to fit their needs and be prepared to financially support that decision.
Of those only ArcGIS isn't a basic CRUD, and yes, there are plenty of open source replacements for it. It's in fact way behind the open source tools.
There aren't for the others, because they are about paying a company so you can use its other customers data, or paying it to get overpriced consultants. None of them are about software.
Sure it’d be great for government acquisitions to subsidize open source, but at what cost?
This is for 200 users and it needs 24/7 support. The budget is $30k/y.
Ahh, you could spin up Redmine on AWS for much less...
Maybe, but I'm going to need to hire a Redmine consultant to help configure it for our needs, add maintaining and updates for that instance to the sysadmin and add it to the helpdesk support - and if we really want 24/7 support, our helpdesk is only 7-5 business hours (the support is for the 'it crashed' which means that the sysadmin gets it on pager duty... but if there's an issue that's application support, so wake up an application team person who isn't on pager duty...). And there's a bug in Redmine, so either get a developer to learn Ruby (this is a Java shop) or beg the core team to fix it...
You know, Jira is looking more attractive as these likely costs start adding up - and it's a fixed price... not going to have an AWSh.. surprise if a bitcoin miner exploits an issue on the base image that didn't get updated.
Local and state governments do look at open source first. The "no cost to start" is very attractive until they get to a "this is a hard problem, you're on your own" and the costs go way past what a commercial application costs.
For government, a predictable budget so that you can ask for next year is valuable. Unknown budgetary costs are were overruns happen. A budget line item of $26,500 per year is much better than a budget line of "$0 to $50,000."
We were a bootstrap so were immediately profitable.
If your product is tested and guaranteed to certain standards, like MySQL and RedHat, then that is something a company may pay for. But a user doesn't really have that high standard so they can be satisfied with just the off brand, derived stuff floating around.
The Stable Diffusion models are proprietary freeware, not open source.
I wonder if, then, Stability AI wanted to sell license exceptions—namely, the ability to use the software for amoral and (mildly) immoral uses.