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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I saw this, I still am highly suspicious about the future of these models and later attempts at monetization. Did they really just drop their 10% royalty thing and decide they'll just open source all their models now?

Another comment mentions llama may get an open license, and there are other emerging alternatives. In six months there will be lots of options. I would not spend my time building anything around a model that started in such a sketchy way.

It would be interesting to hear about why they decided to change their license and what their plans are for the future.

I admit Falcon has really pissed my off because they pretended they had an open source model when they really released a sleazy freemium thing.

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Do you consider the Unity model "sleazy"? But I agree that it was poor form to call it open-source at the time. Sadly, it seems to be standard practice in the LLM space to release models with all kinds of restrictions on use and call them "open source".

Well now Falcon is open source. Given they are giving away something that was very expensive to train, I am grateful.

I don't know unity's model. I call Falcon sleazy because the royalty stuff (plus a bunch of absurd related terms) were buried in the license while the headline said open source. I'm not against commercial products, nor products with free and premium tiers. This otoh felt, like I say, just sleazy.

Here is a link to an explanation of the Unity model.

https://gamedevbeginner.com/is-unity-free/

The explanation is less interesting than the fact they chose not to be upfront in their PR about the limitations of their original license. Personally, I don't care what terms they choose - but I do care if they misrepresent them. Honesty is important, and they weren't.

But all that's void now that they've gone Apache.

Well if its Apache 2.0 now, can't you clone it as-is and have it be open "forever?"

That's part of why I'm interested in their motivation changing licenses. They obviously had a profit motive and a model that centered on collecting rents on the model and decided to back off from it.

Will they keep maintaining their code and improving the models and continue releasing everything under Apache 2.0?

I'm just saying I feel like we got a glimpse of what they're about and it wasn't pretty, so why build around them when there are lots of options.

They dont need to do squat.

Look at Stable Diffusion 1.5 and LLaMA: They are thriving, but the original implementations are ancient history, and Meta/StabilityAI/RunawayML have done precisely nothing. And to be blunt, their legality is very ugly, which already makes Falcon more attractive.

Agree. The Stable Diffusion Open RAIL M license: "You agree not to use the Model or Derivatives of the Model ... To defame, disparage or otherwise harass others"

Does "disparage" have a settled meaning in law? Is a parody disparaging?

https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion/blob/main/LICENS...

> Look at Stable Diffusion 1.5 and LLaMA: They are thriving, but the original implementations are ancient history, and Meta/StabilityAI/RunawayML have done precisely nothing.

I mean, that’s true of SD 1.5 in the sense that what the original creators have done since is new versions (SD 2.0, 2.1, and currently SDXL, which is apparent another SD2-architecture model, and DeepFloyd.) 2.1 has also seen some community uptake, and XL likely will once it is released unless there’s something inhibiting that. DF seems to be slowed by different architecture and high resource cost, but I’ve seen posts about people integrating the DeepFloyd early stage models with other models from the SD ecosystem for the last stage upscaling and final rendering, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it integrated in some of the community UIs as both an integrated workflow and with access to the individual models for mix-and-match workflows.

I dunno. Theres some experimentation with 2.1, but the consensus seems to be that it produces inferior output to 1.5 outside of some niches, and thats before taking the 768x768 1.5 finetunes into account.

Deepfloyd is niche.

SDXL is indeed interesting, especially if its happy with 4/8 bit quant... we will see about that.

Nevertheless StabilityAI seems kinda disconnected from all the innovations going on in the community compared to, say, huggingface.

It's a faulty consensus that came from people comparing outputs from the base model with fine tunes of the SD1.5 model. SD2.1 actually is a far superior model once fine-tuned.

I agree that it's a shame that StabilityAI seem to struggle so much to actually leverage their community (ideally with much more open development)... One could say they're a little too "full of themselves" and think they know better than everyone else.

Very good point, if a community builds up around it, that would make it much more attractive. So chicken / egg in a way. I can definitely see that happening.

Yeah. TBH the biggest hurdle is that Falcon is a different architecture, so the existing tooling won't "just work." A drop in LLaMA or RWKV replacement has a better chance of catching on, even if it leaves some architecture improvements on the table.

This is such a bizarre comment to make about something that is Apache licensed. Who cares what happened before now that it’s truly open?

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