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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

The license is not good: https://falconllm-staging.tii.ae/falcon-2-terms-and-conditio...

It's a modified Apache 2 license with extra clauses that include a requirement to abide by their acceptable use policy, hosted here: https://falconllm-staging.tii.ae/falcon-2-acceptable-use-pol...

But... that modified Apache 2 license says the following:

"The Acceptable Use Policy may be updated from time to time. You should monitor the web address at which the Acceptable Use Policy is hosted to ensure that your use of the Work or any Derivative Work complies with the updated Acceptable Use Policy."

So no matter what you think of their current AUP they reserve the right to update it to anything they like in the future, and you'll have to abide by the new one!

Great example of why I don't like the trend of calling licenses like this "open source" when they aren't compatible with the OSI definition.

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So basically you can never use this for anything non-trivial because they can deny your use-case at any time without even notifying you.

Are licenses that can be altered after the fact even legal? Feels like more companies would use them if it was...

A large company I work for declined to buy licenses from a supplier that had this clause. From my understanding it's not really legal - or at worst it's a gray area - but the language is just too risky if you're not looking to be the test case in court.

Exactly. It’s not about whether it’s enforceable, it’s about the fact that a sketchy license indicates that they might not always operate in good faith.

Why wouldn't they be? The starting presumption for a new work is that you have no permission to use it at all.

I suppose a better question would be "how drastic can the change be to the license?" because by adding that term, you're basically superseding every other term on the license. How do licenses deal with contradictory terms if that's even possible?

The license is explicit that it can be updated unilaterally. Nobody can adopt this software and claim not to know that's a possibility. There are attorneys specializing in open source licenses who comment on HN regularly, and maybe they'll surprise us, but, as a non-lawyer nerding out on this stuff I put all my chips down on "this is legally fine".

Judges don't enforce bad contracts.

Imagine if a landlord sued a tenant after 1 year for a new roof of an apartment because the contract stated that "tenant will be responsible for all repairs" but the tenant pointed out that the contract also said "the house is in perfect and new condition".

Both things cannot be true, so the judge throws it out.

Same thing here, you can't grant someone a license to use something and then immediately say, "You can't use this without checking with us first" it is contradictory.

The two reasons I think it's not that black and white is:

1. This brings up the question of being able to agree to a contract before the contract is written which makes no sense.

2. If it's legal then why don't all companies do it. Instead, companies like Google regularly put out updated terms of service which you have to agree to before continuing to use their service. Often times you don't realize it because it's just another checkbox or button to click before signing in.

There are all sorts of contracts that can be unilaterally terminated.

It unfortunately isn't worded that it only affects new usage. If you needed to check once before your initial use that would be shady but unquestionably legal as the terms of the contract are clear when you are entering into the agreement.

This clause allows them to arbitrarily change the contract with you at will, with no notice. That _shouldn't_ be enforceable but AFAIK that kind of contract has never been tested. It is _likely_ unenforceable though.

Why shouldn't that be enforceable? "Permission to use this software may be withdrawn at any time" seems like it would be an enforceable clause; why would this be less so?

How about you use my service once now and in the future I might decide that the cost of that usage should be double?

Then you stop using the service.

Yes and No. If the full text of the license is "You must contact us for written approval before doing anything with this product" then yes that can be enforced.

But a document like this which basically has a bunch of words followed by a "Just kidding" line, are not enforceable, because it contradicts the previous language. A judge would throw the whole thing out because it doesn't meet the standard of a contract.

Which matters because training an LLM very likely is not protected by copyright.

While for a copyrighted work the default is that you can’t use it unless you have a valid license, for an LLM the default is that you can use it unless you have signed a contract restricting what you can do in return for some consideration.

I don’t think these contracts are designed to be enforced because an attempt to enforce it would reveal it to be hot air, they are just there to scare people into compliance.

Better to download LLMs from unofficial sources to avoid attempted contract shenanigans.

Do you inspect the files manually or with a tool if you download from unofficial sources as a verification?

How will they know you're using it?

Some models may have watermarks

Though it’s easy to workaround if you know it’s there

> So no matter what you think of their current AUP they reserve the right to update it to anything they like in the future, and you'll have to abide by the new one!

I'm so curious if this would actually hold up in court. Does anyone know if there's any case law / precedence around this?

Of course, projects change their licences all the time, why wouldn't it be legal? There's a long history of startups who started with open source/open core gradually closing off or commercialising the licence. This isn't anything new at all.

This is why it's good to read licenses before adopting the tech, especially if it's at all core to your business/project.

No. Projects sometimes stop offering the previous license and start using a different one for new work.

But if your project is Apache-2, you cannot take away someone's license after the fact. You can only stop giving away new Apache-2 licenses from that point on.

The difference here is the license itself has mystery terms that can change at any time. That, is very much not done all the time.

Projects change license for new code going forward. The old code remains available under the previous license (and sometimes new). Here, they are able to change the conditions for existing weights.

Releasing a new version with a new license is not the same as retroactively changing the license terms for copies already distributed of existing versions.

Not the first time they did some license shenanigans (happened with Falcon 1). I applaud their efforts but it seems they are still trying to figure out if/how to monetize.

They’ve got Saudi oil money behind them no?

Falcon always struck me more as a regional prestige project rather than “how to monetise”

Emirati oil money

The Saudis are on a clock. It's got decades on it, but the person who witnesses the end of their oil has already been born.

It may be a prestige project today but make no mistake there's a long game behind it.

I doubt the Emiratis have much interest in monetisation. The value they’re probably looking for is in LLMs as a media asset.

Just like Al Jazeera is valuable for Qataris and sports are valuable for the Saudis. These assets create goodwill domestically and with international stakeholders. Sometimes they make money, but that’s secondary.

If people spend a few hours a day talking to LLMs there’s some media value there.

They may also fear that Western models would be censored or licensed in a way harmful to UAE security and cultural objectives. Imagine if Llama 4’s license prevented military use without approval by some American agency.

The 40b model appears to be pure apache though

That is Falcon 1, not Falcon 2.

Falcon 1 is entirely obsolete at this point, based on every benchmark I've seen.

Well, that really sucks.

Thanks But No Thanks.

It's probably unenforceable

When it is backed by the UAE the muscle you have to contend with is not simply legal muscle, it also includes armed muscle of questionable moral fibre (see support for the RSF).

Do you have any examples of the UAE using its military force to force foreign companies to abide a contract?

they're not going to send their army after you, but that's not what this means.

friendly middle-eastern countries negotiate all kinds of concessions from western governments in exchange for allowing military operations to stage in their country, and "we want you to enforce our IP laws" is an easy one for western governments to grant.

Maybe, but would you risk trying?

How is changing a software licence unenforceable?

scolson said it best:

You can retroactively make a license more open, but you cannot retroactively make it more closed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10672751

And even then you aren't retroactively making it more open. You are just now offering an additional, more open license as well as the existing one.

You haven't taken the original license away, you just provided a better default option.

The same weirdly enough goes in reverse as well. You can provide a more restrictive license retroactively even if the rights holders don't consent as long as the existing license is compatible with the new, more restrictive license. i.e. you can promote a work from Apache-2.0 to GPL-3.0-or-later as the former is fully compatible with the latter. However you can't stop existing users from using it as Apache-2.0, you can only stop offering it yourself with that license (but anyone who has an existing Apache-2.0 copy or who is an original rights holder can freely distribute it).

Didn’t Oracle try with OpenSolaris?

> Great example of why I don't like the trend of calling licenses like this "open source" when they aren't compatible with the OSI definition.

Open source was always a way to weasel about terms, that's why it's open source and not free.

More the other way around.

Just because it's free doesn't mean you can change anything or get the source.

Some claim something is open source but it's just for free.

> Just because it's free doesn't mean you can change anything or get the source.

Free as in speech, not beer.

> Some claim something is open source but it's just for free.

Gratis, not free.

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