You are free to quibble over how truly "open source" these models are, but I am very thankful that Meta has released them.
I am grateful to these developers. I am not grateful for a half open release and the redefinition of established terms. Which, judging by the downvoting in this thread, are now spread with fire and sword.
Projects like Python were completely usable then. But the corporations came, infiltrated existing projects and added often useless things. Python is not much better now than in 2010.
So you have perhaps React and PyTorch. That is a tiny bit of the huge OSS stack. Does Meta pay for ncurses? for xterm? Of course not, it only supports flashy projects that are highly marketable and takes the rest for granted.
So no, only a tiny fraction of the really important OSS devs are employed by FAANG.
Should they? Both of those are client-side software that aren't even really being monetized or profited-off by Meta. You could maybe get mad at Meta's employees for not donating to the software they rely on, but in the case of ncurses and xterm they're both provided without cost. They're not even server-side software, much less a deliberate infrastructure decision.
There's an oddly extremist sect of people that seem to entirely misunderstand what GNU and Free software is. It does not exist to stop people from charging money for software. It does not exist to prevent private interests or corporations from contributing to projects. It does not exist to solicit donations from it's users. All of these are options that some GNU or FOSS projects can choose to embody, not a static rule that they must all abide by. Since Cathedral and the Bazaar was published, people have been scrutinizing different approaches to Free Software and contrasting their impacts. We don't have to champion one approach versus the other because they ultimately coexist and often end up stimulating FOSS development in the long run.
> Python is not much better now than in 2010.
C'mon, now. Next you're going to tell me about how great Perl is in 2024.
At least Meta is shows its true colors here. It must have hurt that the OSS position has arrived at the Economist yesterday, so everyone is circling the wagons.
Again, there are arguments you can make that have weight but this isn't one of them. Every person with connection to wireless internet is running a firmware blob on their "open source" computer, it doesn't mean they're unable to bootstrap from source. Similarly, people that design Open Source infrastructure around Meta's binary weights aren't threatening their business at all. An "open" release of Llama wouldn't help those end-users, isn't even guaranteed to build Llama, and is too large to effectively fork or derive from. There's a good reason engineers aren't paying attention to the dramatic and insubstantial exposes that get written in finance rags.