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Comment by iFire | Hacker News Reader

LICENSE

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

https://github.com/facebookresearch/co-tracker/blob/main/LIC...

This is sadly the standard license for work produced at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) going back at least three or so years. Most researchers are not deeply invested into the details of licensing, so many of them simply assume it is properly open when they see Creative Commons and move on to do more research. This of course ignores the obvious problems with non-commercial licenses, such as the fact that the definition of a commercial entity might very well involve large chunks of the academic world.

Thus, the choice of whatever bloodsu^Wlawyers inside Facebook that pushed this through as the default has had very nasty consequences. However, researchers inside FAIR can apply internally to have an actually open license applied to their work and I have never heard of it being denied. It is not fun (paperwork), but once you sit down and calmly explain the problems with non-commercial licensing and how it likely limits the uptake of their work, many will start pushing for it. My advice is thus just to try to stay positive and talk to the researchers about this rather than try to shame them (not that I have seen this in this thread).

It should also be stated that although this licensing is not "good enough", it is still better than "Open"AI, DeepMind, and many others that gladly just sit on all but a miniscule amount of the code, data, and models they produce.

Thank you for the great explanation and actionable suggestions.

I have to say, some of Meta's past open source and recent open-ish AI model releases have been big wins for the company's image in my mind.

Can't upvote this enough.

> It should also be stated that although this licensing is not "good enough", it is still better than "Open"AI, DeepMind, and many others that gladly just sit on all but a miniscule amount of the code, data, and models they produce.

This is true, but Google Brain has historically been pretty good too.

I think all FAIR researchers and engineers are aware of the NC-CA license limitations.

They still use it because releasing the code for an already approved paper under NC-CA is super easy (~ self-approving by clicking a few buttons) vs following a slow open-sourcing process needed for the MIT license (includes approvals from a sponsoring director or two, committing to support the code for at least a year, etc). Releasing under MIT can easily take a few weeks with each stage requiring finding someone responsible and chasing them across time-zones.

The best practice seems to release under NC-CA and re-license it later under MIT. Maybe this will happen here, too.

Fortunately, "Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once" ([1], [2]) is Apache 2.0 and it's state of art.

1. https://omnimotion.github.io/

2. https://github.com/qianqianwang68/omnimotion

I wonder how useful these models are going to be for "Tracking Everybody Everywhere All at Once".

Is that a sincere question or are you being glib? These models are still expensive to run at scale and probably don't compete with the phone in your pocket for tracking accuracy over a long time.

Hmm would this be compatible with GPL ? I think not but not sure.

Anyway this seems like it would be killer for blender to integrate camera tracking.

> Hmm would this be compatible with GPL ? I think not but not sure.

Not a lawyer, but I don't believe so. The Free Software Foundation say of CC-BY-NC "This license does not qualify as free, because there are restrictions on charging money for copies."[0] The same page says "A nonfree license is automatically incompatible with the GNU GPL."[1]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC-BY-NC

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwa...

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