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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

They didn't. It's not open source.

They can keep pretending it's an open source licence, and I'll keep pretending to respect their copyright in algorithmically generated weights.

We don't have to play dumb. Everyone in this thread knows exactly what the article means, when it says that Llama was open sourced.

This obviously means that the weights were released, and everyone knows this, regardless of any pedantic definition of what "open source" means.

Calling Llama 2 "open source" is obviously a misleading marketing tactic to capitalize on positive connotations of the term, while in reality it's nowhere even close to being open source. This has nothing to do with any kind of pedantry, "open source" is a specific term with specific meaning, and "releasing the weights" is completely orthogonal to it being open source or not.

A challenge here is that it is pedantic, even if it's true. I've been very vocal about how the LLaMAs as well as other models like those released under RAIL licenses are not open source. But the truth is very few people care and attitudes like the one above are common. What needs to happen is for a strong, and I'd suggest copyleft, alternative to emerge that's good enough to make people have to care more about license terms. That plus continued advocacy in the face of people dismissing pedantic distinctions as irrelevant.

> and I'd suggest copyleft, alternative to emerge that's good enough to make people have to care more about license terms

I keep seeing this, but I can't understand how it would work.

Bored nerds will volunteer their time to open source, with little return. That's why I did it.

Generally, nobody will volunteer their money to open source. This is unfortunate, and a huge problem.

Training neural nets requires the money. Where does it come from?

I'm not saying it's a solved problem though there are already initiatives like AI Horde that are doing volunteer distributed inference (it it looks like now fine-tuning) on GPUs https://stablehorde.net/

Plus it can be a strategic choice for institutions and companies, just like Linux is for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-funded_crowdfu...

>A challenge here is that it is pedantic, even if it's true.

it's not pedantry unless it's a minor detail, and given that the entire license behind llama has next to nothing to do with the open source model or existing open source licensing, this isn't a minor detail.

the court-room doesn't care if 'few people care'.

it's obvious to anyone that has been to a CS convention in the past 20 years that the whole open-source thing from large corporations is used to leverage good-will to recruit useful labor and to collect community 'altruism-points' so that they can make shadier decisions later on and hopefully trap a captive audience, not to follow the ethical ideals of open-source but to enhance their bottom-line.

'Trojan-horse open-source'.

> the court-room doesn't care

Not sure if you were aware, but nobody is in court right now.

>it's not pedantry unless it's a minor detail

It is minor though. The license allows almost everyone to use it, excluding literally like Apple and Google, and for a few other unenforceable use cases.

Everyone else is in the clear.

> We don't have to play dumb. Everyone in this thread knows exactly what the article means, when it says that Llama was open sourced. > > This obviously means that the weights were released, and everyone knows this, regardless of any pedantic definition of what "open source" means.

It's no surprise you're disinterested in the meaning of "open source" given how much you misuse "everyone".

And it is no surprise that someone who cares only about pedantry will fail to address the argument, and instead go off on an irrelevant tangent.

But feel free to reread the original comment and actually talk about the substance of the claim, instead of doing the normal "Well actually" hacker news comment.

Objecting to a notion that black is white is hardly a "well actually" pedantry. We're talking about the whole essence of the meaning of the term, not about some minor details in its definition.

I'd rather say: everyone who actually checked the license knows that it's obviously not open source in any way.

So then yes, you agree that everyone knows that the weights were released.

Which is the point. No need to play dumb. You are not confused about what was released.

Please read what you're typing before hitting send and stop wasting our time.

Hey, as long as you admit that you are aware that the weights were released, and that is what the announcement meant, then you agree with me!

So great! You are not confused at all, and are aware that the announcement meant that the weights were released!

Given legal implications, 'pedantic' is a rather inaccurate descriptor.

can you expand on that?

It’s open but not open source. Getting Llama is like getting a binary executable. You don’t get the source (training data / model / code), so you can’t make changes and recompile, but you can use it and fine tune.

What does open mean? I'm not sure we really have a widely shared, common definition of this, contrary to open source.

> You don’t get the source

You do IIUC. But your can't use it for all purposes (like serving 1B users), which is what makes it non open source.

Its license is quite obviously not matching the definition of Open Source:

> v. You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Llama 2 or derivative works thereof).

> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.

> Prohibited Uses: <a whole page full of text>

The license has a bunch of terms and restrictions that make it incompatible with accepted definitions of open source software.

LLaMA2 isn't "Open Source" - and why it doesn't matter https://www.alessiofanelli.com/blog/llama2-isnt-open-source

Meta can call Llama open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/21/llama_is_not_open_sou...

Software licenses masquerading as open source (I wrote that one) http://marble.onl/posts/software-licenses-masquerading-as-op...

There have been lots of other posts on here about this too.

It's closer to "shared source" or "source available". The license is not compliant with the OSD[1] which is the de-facto (but not de jure, for you pedants out there) definition of "Open Source" in common usage.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd/

> but not de jure, for you pedants out there

This means that the term "open source" is not legally defined (and not recognized by lawyer / judges) [and the OSD], right?

Yes, "de jure" more or less translates to "by law", and "de facto" is something like "by practice" or "by convention". So the Open Source Initiative folks have no legal basis to enforce use of their definition, but in practice it's so widely used and acknowledged that for all practical purposes it is the definition.

Basically under the actual terms of what open source is there can be no limits to particular users. Meta, in order to protect their competitive market share has said explicitly in Paragraph Two of their licensing terms

--- " If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion. --

Doing so, technically, takes the license out of the category of “Open Source.”

Sources: Open Source Initiate Argument https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-ope...

Llama Terms https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-dow...

I wonder who they are targeting with this restriction on 700 million MAU.

Snapchat

The big boys, MS & Big G

Definitions are determined by actual usage. If people call Llama 2’s license open source then ipso facto it’s open source.

There's about 25 years of actual usage that clearly states otherwise. We can give your idea some weight after 25 years of people consistently calling Llama 2 open source, effectively diluting the term to mean nothing in the process. Meanwhile it's just as if I told you that the sky is green.

There’s a history of actual usage among some subsets of people, not for everyone. Regardless, it doesn’t really matter if there’s history as long as usage is in fact changing. “Literally” meant one thing much longer than it has been a superlative.

I said above that the sky is green, just like people from Meta said that Llama 2 is open source.

See! Actual usage! The sky is now green.

The only reason people say that Llama 2 is open source is because they have been misled, not because the definition is changing. There's a lot of goodwill around the term "open source" because of its actual meaning, so it will always be tempting to abuse it for your own benefit, as not everyone bothers to check whether your claims are actually true.

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