It’s amazing to see others build on top of open-source projects. Forks like RamaLama are exactly what open source is all about. Developers with different design philosophies can still collaborate in the open for everyone’s benefit.

Some folks on the Ollama team have contributed directly to the OCI spec, so naturally we started with tools we know best. But we made a conscious decision to deviate because AI models are massive in size - on the order of gigabytes - and we needed performance optimizations that the existing approaches didn’t offer.

We have not forked llama.cpp, We are a project written in Go, so naturally we’ve made our own server side serving in server.go. Now, we are beginning to hit performance, reliability and model support problems. This is why we have begun transition to Ollama’s new engine that will utilize multiple engine designs. Ollama is now naturally responsible for the portability between different engines.

I did see the complaint about Ollama not using Jinja templates. Ollama is written in Go. I’m listening but it seems to me that it makes perfect sense to support Go templates.

We are only a couple of people, and building in the open. If this sounds like vendor lock-in, I'm not sure what vendor lock-in is?

You can check the source code: https://github.com/ollama/ollama

I'm glad there is a more open source alternative to Ollama now.