Ollama violating llama.cpp license for over a year | Hacker News Reader

Ollama violating llama.cpp license for over a year

github.com

202 pointsJabrov68 comments

I don't see how this claimed issue is valid.

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/L... says:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

The issue submitter claims:

"The terms of the MIT license require that it distribute the copyright notice in both source and binary form."

But: a) that doesn't seem to be in the license text as far I can see; b) I see no evidence that upstream arranged to ship any notice in their binaries, so I don't see how it's reasonable to expect downstreams to do it; and c) in the distribution world (Debian, etc) that takes great care about license compliance, patching upstreams to include copyright notices in binaries isn't a thing. It's not the norm, and this is considered acceptable in our ecosystem.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the issue linked does not make the case that there's anything unacceptable going on here.

If it's not valid, why was this ticket not disputed and/or closed?

Not really a fan of the “failure to sufficiently deny an accusation is an admission of guilt” line of thought.

Maybe they’re getting a legal opinion. Maybe they’re leaving it open while they talk business to business. Maybe the right person to address the issue is on vacation.

Lots of people and companies choose not to engage in public battles. I don’t think that should be read as a sign of guilt (or innocence).

> Maybe they’re getting a legal opinion.

Acknowledging the issue is something you are looking into does not incriminate you.

You cannot argue successfully in court that the copy of the binary compiled code is not a copy of a substantial portion of the software. The fix is very trivial. This should not be an open issue.

I won't address the rest, but:

> b) I see no evidence that upstream arranged to ship any notice in their binaries, so I don't see how it's reasonable to expect downstreams to do it

Downstream is not in compliance. The fact that upstream has made that compliance hard/impossible is not relevant to the fact that downstream is infringing.

And it's not hard at all. You just include a text file with a third party software notice that has all the licenses, alongside the binary. All major companies shipping F/OSS in their products somehow manage to do this just fine (I have personally done so for three different products at two different companies).

It's so normal and common that your car's infotainment screen has a page for it, and it causes the guy who built a useful open source project to get hate mail, because his email address is listed there.

a) Correct. b) Not relevant. The license says what it says regardless of what upstream does or doesn’t do. If someone wants to use the code they should comply with the license requirements.

A README is often included with binaries. That’s a good place to include any licensing information.

The need to extract license and copyright information for binary distribution is universally accepted among Open Source license compliance practitioners and lawyers.

There is a whole industry of tools around it (Fossid, Fossa, BlackDuck, Snyk), as well as Open Source projects ( FOSSology, scancode, oss-review-toolkit).

Re: Debian, they have copyright files in their packaged that are manually curated by Debian Developers and should include all those license texts and copyright notices.

Ah - we're talking about different things.

I was concerned about the implication (or so I thought) that a binary executable should provide the required documentation (eg. via --version or similar). You are thinking about the text being included as part of a binary redistribution. That did not occur to me, because to me, GitHub issues refer to sources, not binary redistributions.

But of course GitHub does have a Releases page. If those binary redistributions do not contain the license text, then I accept that's something that Debian does do, and is the norm in our ecosystem.

But as other commenters have said, it's not completely clear that this is actually a violation of the license, since https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases/tag/v0.7.0 for example bundles both source and binary downloads and the bundle does contain the license text via the source file download. Certainly anyone who downloads the binary from the maintainer via GitHub does have the required notice made available to them.

> in the distribution world (Debian, etc) that takes great care about license compliance, patching upstreams to include copyright notices in binaries isn't a thing

On Debian, you will find the llama.cpp copyright notice in /usr/share/doc/llama.cpp/copyright if you have installed the llama.cpp binary package.

I'm continually puzzled by their approach - it's such self inflicted negative PR.

Building on llama is perfectly valid and they're adding value on ease of use here. Just give the llama team appropriately prominent and clearly worded credit for their contributions and call it a day.

i dont find it puzzling at all. the website is basically a blank canvas. contact information is nonexistent.

ignoring the issue is just another way of saying "catch me if you can." and even then open source lawsuits are rather toothless anyway, so the company clearly expects there to be zero consequence.

Ollama is YC21 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama and was founded by the engineers of what became Docker Desktop

You know, the tool that very famously had a massive rug pull once it gained marketshare https://www.servethehome.com/docker-abruptly-starts-charging...

> First here, we understand that Docker needs to generate revenue. Creating a foundational technology and not having revenue to grow the business is hard. At the same time, the notice period is what one may consider short.

If the money was starting to run dry, with everyone using the tech (and Docker Hub in particular) but not really giving them any money for it, then something was bound to change.

It's cool that there are other alternatives to Docker Hub though and projects like Podman. I feel like with a bigger grace period, the Docker pricing changes wouldn't have been a big deal.

FWIW, llama.cpp links to and fetches models from ollama (https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/tools/run/...).

This issue seems to be the typical case of someone being bothered for someone else, because it implies there's no "recognition of source material" when there's quite a bit of symbiosis between the projects.

Yes and no, the problem with not expecting that a prominent project follow the rules is that it makes it easier and more likely that no one will follow the rules.

Broken window theory.

Police broke my window. No theory needed.

Well, llama.cpp supports fetching models from a bunch of different sources according to that file, Hugging Face, ModelScope, Ollama, any HTTP/local source. Seems fair to say they've added support for any source one most likely will find the LLM model you're looking for at.

Not sure I'd say there is "symbiosis" between ModelScope and llama.cpp just because you could download models from there via llama.cpp, just like you wouldn't say there is symbiosis between LM Studio and Hugging Face, or even more fun example: YouTube <> youtube-dl/yt-dlp.

Symbiosis states that a relationship exists. Subcategories of symbiosis state how useful that relationship is to either party, and they're determined by the observer rather than the organisms involved.

>FWIW

It's not worth much. That is a compeltely different thing.

What you mention equates to downloading a file from the web.

Ollama using code from llama.cpp without complying with the license terms is illegal.

The fact that Ollama has been downplaying their reliance on llama.cpp has been known in the local LLM community for a long time now. Describing the situation as "symbiosis" is very misleading IMO.

I think it’s fair to push for clear attribution in these cases, but it’s also important to remember that the MIT license is intentionally permissive. It was designed to make sharing code easy without too many hoops. If Ollama is genuinely trying to be part of the open-source community, a little transparency and acknowledgment can avoid a lot of bad blood.

MIT is permissive given you follow the license. You can't just copy the code and omit the license and copyright, that's not fine, even if many people like to pretend that it is.

It's permissive; but that doesn't imply not crediting people for their work

Consensus seems to be forming around the fact that Ollama is not genuinely trying to be part of the open-source community.

Take a look at https://github.com/containers/ramalama/tree/main#credit-wher... for comparison. Ollama really should improve their acknowledgements and check license conformance more thoroughly.

And yet, neither the named individual or "The ggml authors" (as stated as the Copyright holder in llama.cpp/LICENSE) is mentioned here.

This "high-5" acknowledgement isn't license compliance.

Indeed.

It is “nice” but that does not make it compliant.

Huh, I wonder if people really follow MIT in that form. I don't remember any binary I downloaded from github that contained a third_party_licenses or dependency_licenses folder that contained every linked library's LICENCE files...

Do any of you guys remember having a third_party_licenses folder after downloading a binary release from github/sourceforge? I think many popular tools will be out of compliance if this was checked...

It's certainly not unheard of but, of those who bother to comply, I think most who go this route just embed the info into the binary instead of adding more files.

Likely the only reason this is noteworthy is someone checked a year ago but no correction was ever made.

At every company I worked for in the past 20 years, including such a file in any public release on any channel is part of the standard legal checklist. It's usually not a folder though but rather a single file where all the mentions are combined:

https://github.com/search?q=THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES&type=code

> The terms of the MIT license require that it distribute the copyright notice in both source and binary form.

No, MIT does not require that. The license says:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The exact meaning of this sentence has never been challenged and never been ruled upon. Considering ollama's README has a link to llama.cpp's project page (which includes the license), I'd say the requirement has been satisfied.

“Linking to a page that includes” is not the same as “including”. I don’t think that the requirement is satisfied.

I have been aware that Ollama is based on/uses llama.cpp since the first day I started using Ollama. It is not like Ollama is trying to hide the use of llama,cpp, but sure, it would be a good idea in the Ollama app to have a reference in an 'About' menu item, or some such place.

It is certainly possible for a new Ollama user to not notice the acknowledgement.

It's not a matter of "would be a good idea", it's a legal matter of you're in breach of someone else's copyright.

Good for you, but there are many people who aren't aware of this fact, precisely because Ollama is so non-transparent about it. It comes up regularly on r/LocalLLaMA etc.

[0]: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/LICENSE#L3...

> ollama doesn't include it.

I see it here? https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/L...

Download a binary release of ollama and show that line again.

The same MIT license is in the ollama project as is in the llama.cpp project, is this not sufficient?

llamma.cpp https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/LICENSE

ollama.cpp https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/LICENSE

The clause at issue is this one:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The copyright notice is the bit at the top that identifies who owns the copyright to the code. You can use MIT code alongside any license you'd like as long as you attribute the MIT portions properly.

That said, this is a requirement that almost no one follows in non-source distributions and almost no one makes a stink about, so I suspect that the main reason why this is being brought up specifically is because a lot of people have beef with Ollama for not even giving any kind of public credit to llama.cpp for being the beating heart of their system.

Had they been less weird about giving credit in the normal, just-being-polite way I don't think anyone would have noticed that technically the license requires them to give a particular kind of attribution.

Fair enough response to my post but they have the llama license too https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/L...

They need to supply license text and copyright notice with the binary distribution, as well.

Many, many projects on GitHub don’t do it and are not license compliant.

That is actually unspecified in the license, undecided in court, and as you note very infrequently applied. I can see an argument that the license ought to be read that way, but the fact is that it very rarely is. The only reason why Ollama is being singled out here is because people have long-standing beef with them not doing the regular polite attribution that actually is normal in the community.

Funny how all those large companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year getting those attributions right. All those open source license information pages like https://sieportal.siemens.com/oss/oss.html are just for fun, right?

The Playstation 3/4 and the switch also have such license information available via a menu that isn't buried, too. This cellphone has settings -> about - > legal - > open source licenses - the top option. That opens a window that is hundreds of pages long of links to licenses for every library used.

The license says:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Is your argument that a binary is not a copy or substantial portion of the Software?

If you distribute a binary, I think it's pretty obvious that either the binary itself should include the notice and the license, or the archive with the binary should include it. Ex: most packaging systems include the licenses in the docs directory that nobody looks at, which is probably sufficient.

It is the same license but the copyright notice is different, so no, not sufficient.

Fair enough response to my post but they have the llama license too https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/L...

The GH issue's point [0] is that this isn't in the binary distributions, but it has to be "included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" (from the MIT license), which applies to binary distributions as well.

[0]: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185

Right, sorry. Didn’t notice.

No, this completely misses the point of what the issue is about. You're missing the copyright holder information, the rest of the license is almost secondary to that fact.

I noticed this "thank you" today: "GGML

Thank you to the GGML team for the tensor library that powers Ollama’s inference – accessing GGML directly from Go has given a portable way to design custom inference graphs and tackle harder model architectures not available before in Ollama."

Source: https://ollama.com/blog/multimodal-models

Thanks for the linked article! I was looking for a local vision model to recognize my handwritten notes, and this article provided a good TLDR about doing this in Ollama.

I think Ollama can improve TLDR and add more attribution to llama.cpp to their README. I don't understand why there's no reply from ollama maintainers for so long

It only matters if they sue. They won't, so it doesn't matter. Corporations have learned which open-source licenses are legal to ignore. One other project which openly declared an intention to ignore the licenses of its dependencies is SimpleX Chat, and they're getting away with it just fine.

As an analogy, using AI/LLM generated comments is against HN guidelines, but you won’t find this proviso in the HN guidelines proper. Where this information is communicated and how is left as an exercise for the reader.

A year of complaining but nobody has thought to just implement it themselves and push a PR?

A PR that nobody would accept? There were like 20 pull requests implementing grammar sampling parameter handling (largely distasteful) at the time, over 16 months, absolutely zero acknowledgement from ollama maintainers.

Sending patches to ollama is less worthwhile than watching paint dry.

Not to be insulting or anything, but I’m not sure what a PR for “largely distasteful” means?

This is referring to implementation. I argued, simply augmenting the API to match grammar property of the llama.cpp library was not enough, as it doesn't recognise the reality of Ollama consumption. None of the existing Ollama clients (GUI) could support such implementation as that would require a substantial effort on the maintainer's part (adding additional knobs in the UI, etc.) Considering grammar sampling is not really that popular in the first place, it would mean that the vast majority of clients would end up not supporting it.

This has so far turned out to be the case: they ended up implementing it. And distastefully, too, exactly like the other 20 PR's would have implemented it; at the API level, that is.

My fork specifically introduces parsing of GBNF code blocks (Markdown ```gbnf) from the system prompt, so that any of the existing clients are supported out of the box without any effort on maintainer's part.

Ollama has an mit license, stop eating yourselves, put up a two line merge request rather than complaining that someone else hasn’t for the last two years.

Also, am I missing something? How is this not sufficient? ollama/llama/lamma.cpp/LICENSE

Reason #1395292 that you should be using vLLM, but given the downvotes I get for pointing this out it appears that HN really hates lots of tok/s (yes, even with batch size of 1 on your low tier GPU this is true)

Why does anyone in the GenAI care about copyright, licenses, etc? (besides for being nice and getting the community to like you, which should matter for Ollama)

This whole field is built off piracy at a scale never before seen. Aaron Swartz blushes when he thinks about what Llama and other projects pulled off without anyone getting arrested. Why should I care when one piracy project messes with another?

The whole field is basically a celebration of copyright abolitionism and the creation of "dual power" ala 1917 Russia where copyright doesn't matter. Have some consistency and stop caring about this stuff.

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