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Comment by gmm1990 | Hacker News Reader

gmm1990·

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

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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.

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