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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> They are now the true open source AI providers

Except neither this model nor several of their recently-lauded “open” releases are open source; they are CC-BY-NC 4.0, aka, you are free to tinker and share, but not to use the work or derivatives for commercial purposes. Any community effort the Meta’s hobbyist-source license attracts is work that isn’t enabling commercial competition, unlike actual open source systems like Suno’s Bark (MIT) or even use-restricted-but-not-non-commercial shared source licenses like Stable Diffusion’s CreativeML Open RAIL-M.

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Some of these models are really open source. For example segment anything is MIT licensed.

> Any community effort the Meta’s hobbyist-source license attracts is work that isn’t enabling commercial competition

So what?

Sure, maybe the Googles of the world aren't building on top of meta's products, but I can tell you that a lot of startups are.

Does it make these startups vulnerable, to long term future legal action? Sure, but nobody is thinking that far ahead. What people are thinking about is how to get users and show off flashy demos to investors.

Instead, people are just pushing out products, breaking meta's licenses, and not telling people about it, while they attempt to get traction.

Strict licensing, without enforcement, is not worth the paper that the contract is written on.

So yes, it is still beneficial that the code is released, even with a bad license.

> So what?

So, that's a reason that might wish to release a non-open-source model with this particular license, and one that provides an alternative to the “Meta is doing this because they stand to benefit from open source models taking off”, specifically, “Meta is doing this because it stands to benefit from drawing energy away from open source models into ones that cannot legally be used to commercially compete”.

> Does it make these startups vulnerable, to long term future legal action? Sure, but nobody is thinking that far ahead.

Well, the startups may not be, but Meta maybe is, and its acquiring a zero-cost, upside-only investment in every startup doing that. “Unjust enrichment”.

This might be an unpopular opinion on HN but the whole “ask for forgiveness not for permission” view some take to business feels pretty bad taste to me.

If it works it works.

Crying about it doesn't change it's effectiveness.

And really, I don't think meta cares either.

They likely are releasing this stuff, with a strict license, just so they don't have any liability, or bad publicity.

But, they likely are happy that everyone is using their stuff.

Aha, yes, the business ethics 'it's only illegal if you get caught' that gave us Elizabeth Holmes and similar.

That is indeed how the law works. The law is nothing without enforcement.

A better example would be Uber, though, a company which is now massively success despite early legal problems

Also, once again, Facebook likely wants everyone to be using their product and is unlikely to go after people.

But I am able to train my own LLM on the output of their LLM, right? Or are the big AI players going to argue that you cannot train an AI on data you don't have a license to? (See the catch 22 here?)

> But I am able to train my own LLM on the output of their LLM, right?

Sure. And, there's an argument that the license only applies to the code because model weights aren’t subject to copyright anyway. And available-under-any-license is a lot better than OpenAI’s current stance as far as enabling anyone else, since they’ve gone completely closed to the point where even their papers on their models are more PR than reproducible science. There's a continuum from secret sauce to “do what thou wilt”, and I am not a zealot arguing anything not Open Source must be rejected as not a positive step.

I think some of the licenses specifically forbid that. (as far as I remember, chatGPT has that in their terms of service).

This is interesting, I remember previously bark was license encumbered because the neural codec provider Encodec (also by meta) was non-free.

EnCodec has since been relicensed to MIT.

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