No real information, just a marketing spiel.
That's not open source!
I'm going to call this "Wizard of Ozzing". You give away the spectacle of magic tricks, but none of the science and machinery to do it yourself. You're still hiding it all behind fake virtue signalling.
Open source in AI is open weights, open training scripts, open inference scripts, open training datasets, and associated helper utilities. Without the science lab, you cannot replicate the science.
Weights in a vacuum are not open. It's a trick.
If you actually go look at the open source or few software definitions, that's what they're about - being able to make modifications.
Just like an open source software project doesn't need a public record of the rationale for all architectural decisions in order to qualify.
You can e.g. give away a closed-source game engine with an editor, where you can modify the prebuilt levels, and create your own, to your heart's content. But you can't build it from scratch in a controlled environment, and can't audit it. You also can't do modifications where the level editor interface is not sufficient, e.g. in the renderer. That's not open source, that's freeware.
For ML models, the training set is a crucial part of their source.
I’m happy open weights exist, but it is not truly open source.
- Pretrain
- Fine tune
- Catastrophic forgetting
- Learning rate
- Adapter layer
If you understand these terms, then you understand why "open weights" are not the same as "open source".
"Open weights" are obfuscated and minified freeware.
The prevailing strategy for most companies is to publish some bullshit (like a cli or a model downloader) and call it open source, the bar is waaay low and we are just trying to raise it a couple of inches, it's not helpful to go for the throat and demand that it be raised to the sky!
This definition of "open source" for AI must not be allowed to take hold. It's pernicious.
Weights are a compiled binary. Encumbered freeware.
Vanguard has an odd corporate structure where it’s owned by the funds that it manages, so it’s effectively a co-op owned by its customers.
I think it probably doesn't apply to other majority holders like BlackRock though.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
tl;dr: They no longer publish source packages except to paying customers. If the paying customers republish the source, then RedHat closes the account.
I'm surprised none of the upstream developers have sued them for violating the license. There's no way I'd trust an organization that was behaving so unethically with control over my machine's package manager.
Anyway, I've been pretty happy with Devuan (Debian without SystemD). I find it much more stable than Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, etc., and all the userspace stuff I care about works great.
Sounds like that implies that they probably actually aren't.
>If the paying customers republish the source, then RedHat closes the account.
Even if you ignore the above and think only about the official sources provided direct from the customer portal, it's still not a violation IMO.
Because that's not a restriction on how you can use the software you've been provided, it's a restriction on which services you can expect Red Hat to continue providing you, i.e. providing new software in the form of updates. The software you have already been provided continues functioning, it's not like the system gets bricked if your account is closed. GPL only specifies "what are you allowed you do with this piece of software you have been provided with", it doesn't guarantee a future relationship between the provider and receiver.
At worst it's a murky area, not a "systematic violation" as you claimed.
Also, like, it's a hypothetical thing the user agreement claims could be done, not something that necessarily is done. I don't think there has ever been an actual demonstrated instance of an account being closed because of that.
IIRC thats incorrect, RHEL gets some fixes before CentOS Stream.
Think of these huge funds as proxies. It's like someone with little finance trading saying most of the internet is owned by cloudflare or RIPE or ARIN.
You are much better off sticking with Debian anyway, or looking at Guix for a significant improvement.
Vanguard and other large institutions own a huge chunk of everything because most investors don't buy stocks directly, they buy them through mutual funds, ETFs, etc...
The classical definition of open source (cited in this release as Stallman's GPL definition of the preferred way in which to modify code) kind of breaks for ML programs.
This is a good update on the definition of open source from a quite reputable and influential FOSS source.
Your presumption that this article isn't sufficiently pure because in addition to being a company that does Free Software, it needs to do so without doing anything that resembles an ad or in any way ensures profitability is pedantic. If we had it your way the only open source software we would have would be mom's basement projects with shoestring budgets.