Hacker News Reader

Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t mean it’s a bad license, just that it doesn’t meet the definition. There are legitimate reasons for companies to use source-available licenses. You still get to see the source code and do some useful things with it, but read the terms to see what you can do.

Meanwhile, there are also good reasons not to water down a well-defined term so it becomes meaningless like “agile” or “open.”

This gets confusing because people want to use “open source” as a sort of marketing term that just means it’s good, so if you say it’s not open source that’s taken to imply it’s bad.

View on HN

But it’s also a bit absurd in a sense - let’s say you have all of Meta’s code and training data. Ok, now what? Even if you also had a couple spare data centers, unlimited money, and an army of engineers, you can’t even find enough NVIDIA cards to do the training run. This isn’t some homebrew shit, it’s millions upon millions of dollars of computational power devoted to building this thing.

I think at a fundamental level people have to start thinking a little differently about what this is, what open really means, and the like.

People are thinking what open really means, and they're telling you this isn't open. it definitely isn't Open Source, as defined by the OSI.

Open Source has a specific meaning and this doesn't meet it. It's generous of Meta to give us these models and grant us access to them, and let us modify them, fine tune them, and further redistribute them. It's really great! But we're still in the dark as to how they came about the weights. It's a closed, proprietary process, of which we have some details, which is interesting and all, but that's not the same as having access to the actual mechanism used to generate the model.

This is like saying an image is or isn't open source. The model itself isn't a program, so asking whether it's open source or not is a bit of a category error.

So it's a bit silly for anyone to claim a model is open source, but it's not silly to say a model is open. What open means isn't well defined when it comes to a model in the same way that source code is.

Imo if someone reveals the model's architecture and makes the weights available with minimal limitations, it's probably reasonable to call it open. I don't know that that would apply to llama though since I believe there are limitations on how you can use the model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com