Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

> Devstral 2 ships under a modified MIT license, while Devstral Small 2 uses Apache 2.0. Both are open-source and permissively licensed to accelerate distributed intelligence.

Uh, the "Modified MIT license" here[0] for Devstral 2 doesn't look particularly permissively licensed (or open-source):

> 2. You are not authorized to exercise any rights under this license if the global consolidated monthly revenue of your company (or that of your employer) exceeds $20 million (or its equivalent in another currency) for the preceding month. This restriction in (b) applies to the Model and any derivatives, modifications, or combined works based on it, whether provided by Mistral AI or by a third party. You may contact Mistral AI (sales@mistral.ai) to request a commercial license, which Mistral AI may grant you at its sole discretion, or choose to use the Model on Mistral AI's hosted services available at https://mistral.ai/.

[0] https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Devstral-2-123B-Instruct-25...

Personally I really like the normalization of these "Permissively" licensed models that only restrict companies with massive revenues from using them for free.

If you want to use something, and your company makes $240,000,000 in annual revenue, you should probably pay for it.

That's fine, but I don't think you should call it open source or call it MIT or even 'modified MIT.' Call it Mistral license or something along those lines

You're presently illustrating exactly why Stallman et al were such sticklers about "Free Software."

"Open Source" is nebulous. It reasonably works here, for better or worse.

Free software to me means GPL and associates, so if that is what Stallman was trying to be a stickler for - it worked.

Open source has a well understood meaning, including licenses like MIT and Apache - but not including MIT but only if you make less than $500million dollars, MIT unless you were born on a wednesday, etc.

MIT and Apache are free software licenses in Stallman's sense, and the FSF has always been clear about it.

>"Open Source" is nebulous

No it isn't it is well defined. The only people who find it "nebulous" are people who want the benefits without upholding the obligations.

https://opensource.org/definition-annotated

imo this is a hill people need to stop dying on. Open source means "I can see the source" to most of the world. Wishing it meant "very permissively licensed" to everyone is a lost cause.

And honestly it wasn't a good hill to begin with: if what you are talking about is the license, call it "open license". The source code is out in the open, so it is "open source". This is why the purists have lost ground to practical usage.

> Open source means "I can see the source" to most of the world

well we don't really want to open that can of worms though, do we?

I don't agree with ceding technical terms to the rest of the world. I'm increasingly told we need to stop calling cancer detection AI "AI" or "ML" because it is not the 'bad AI' and confuses people.

I guess I'm okay with being intransigent.

If you are happy that time is being spent quibbling over definitions instead of actually focusing on the ideal, I'm not sure you care about the ideals as much as you say you do.

Who gives a shit what we call "cancer AI", what matters is the result.

> imo this is a hill people need to stop dying on.

As someone who was born and raised on FOSS, and still mostly employed to work on FOSS, I disagree.

Open source is what it is today because it's built by people with a spine who stand tall for their ideals even if it means less money, less industry recognition, lots of unglorious work and lots of other negatives.

It's not purist to believe that what built open source so far should remain open source, and not wanting to dilute that ecosystem with things that aren't open source, yet call themselves open source.

You should stand up for your ideals, but dying on the hill of what you call your ideals is actually getting in the way of that.

Because instead of making the point "this license isn't as permissive as it could/should be" (easy to understand), instead the point being made is "this isn't real open source", which comes across to most people as just some weird gate-keeping / No True Scotsman kinda thing.

no, “No True Scotsman” is just about people not categories like open source

Good job missing the point.

Though given the stance you are taking in this conversation, I'm not surprised you want to quibble over that.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ultimately you have to imbue words with meaning, otherwise it is impossible to have a discussion. what i said about no true scotsman was false, i was just trying to prove a point.

What point were you proving?

"No True Scotsman" is about specifically about changing the rules to exclude a new example you don't want to permit. The rules haven't changed, and the attempts to violate the requirements aren't new. Proprietary licenses continue to be proprietary. Open Source continues to not allow restrictions on commercial use.

> Open source is what it is today because it's built by people with a spine who stand tall for their ideals even if it means less money, less industry recognition, lots of unglorious work and lots of other negatives.

With all due respect, don't you see the irony in saying "people with a spine who stand tall for their ideals", and then arguing that attaching "restrictions" which only affect the richest megacorporations in the world somehow makes the license not permissive anymore?

What ideals are those exactly? So that megacorporations have the right to use the software without restrictions? And why should we care about that?

> What ideals are those exactly?

Anyone can use the code for whatever purpose they want, in any way they want. I've never been a "rich megacorporation", but I have gone from having zero money to having enough money, and I still think the very same thing about the code I myself release as I did from the beginning, it should be free to be used by anyone, for any purpose.

I don't think you get access to source in this case. The release is a binary blob.

And back in the day, people incorrectly called it "public domain". That was wrong too.

> if what you are talking about is the license, call it "open license".

If you want to build something proprietary, call it something else. "Open Source" is taken.

That's probably better, but Modified MIT is pretty descriptive, I read it as "mostly MIT, but with caveats for extreme cases" which is about right, if you already know what the MIT license entails

Whatever name they come up with for a new license will be less useful, because I'll have to figure out that this is what that is

To me this is highly misleading. The core idea behind MIT is that you can use it for anything, including commercial. A "you can use it for commercial only if you're revenue is small" is not remotely MIT-like. It's commercial with a freemium tier.

These are not permissively licensed though, the terms "permissive license" has connotations that pretty much everyone who is into FLOSS understands (same with "open source").

I do not mind having a license like that, my gripe is with using the terms "permissive" and "open source" like that because such use dilutes them. I cannot think of any reason to do that aside from trying to dilute the term (especially when some laws, like the EU AI Act, are less restrictive when it comes to open source AIs specifically).

> I do not mind having a license like that, my gripe is with using the terms "permissive" and "open source" like that because such use dilutes them. I cannot think of any reason to do that aside from trying to dilute the term (especially when some laws, like the EU AI Act, are less restrictive when it comes to open source AIs specifically).

Good. In this case, let it be diluted! These extra "restrictions" don't affect normal people at all, and won't even affect any small/medium businesses. I couldn't care less that the term is "diluted" and that makes it harder for those poor, poor megacorporations. They swim in money already, they can deal with it.

We can discuss the exact threshold, but as long as these "restrictions" are so extreme that they only affect huge megacorporations, this is still "permissive" in my book. I will gladly die on this hill.

> I couldn't care less that the term is "diluted" and that makes it harder

It also makes life harder for individuals and small companies, because this is not Open Source. It's incompatible with Open Source, it can't be reused in other Open Source projects.

Terms have meanings. This is not Open Source, and it will never be Open Source.

> It also makes life harder for individuals and small companies, because this is not Open Source. It's incompatible with Open Source, it can't be reused in other Open Source projects.

I'm amazed at the social engineering that the megacorps have done with the whole Open Source (TM) thing. They engineered a whole generation of engineers to advocate not in their own self-interest, nor for the interest of the little people, but instead for the interest of the megacorps.

As soon as there is even the tiniest of restrictions, one which doesn't affect anyone besides a bunch of richiest corporations in the world, a bunch of people immediately come out of the woodwork, shout "but it's not open source!" and start bullying everyone else to change their language. Because if you even so much as inconvenience a megacorporation even a little bit it's not Open Source (TM) anymore.

If we're talking about ideals then this is something I find unsettling and dystopian.

I hard disagree with your "It also makes life harder for individuals and small companies" statement. It's the opposite. It gives them a competitive advantage vs megacorps, however small it may be.

Nobody cares if they use a license that inconveniences megacorporations. The issue is how they try to present the license.

> start bullying everyone else to change their language

Either words matter or they do not. If words matter, then trying to dilute the term is a bad thing because it tries to weaken something that matters. If words do not matter, then the people who "bully everyone" can be easily ignored. You cannot have these two things at the same time.

> Good. In this case, let it be diluted! These extra "restrictions" don't affect normal people at all,

Yes, they do, and the only reason for using the term “open source” for things whose licensing terms flagrantly defy the Open Source definition is to falsely sell the idea that using the code carries the benefits that are tied to the combination of features that are in the definition and which are lost with only a subset of those features. The freedom to use the software in commercial services is particularly important to end-users that are not interested in running their own services as a guarantee against lock-in and of whatever longevity they are able to pay to have provided even if the original creator later has interests that conflict with offering the software as a commercial service.

If this deception wasn't important, there would be no incentive not to use the more honest “source available for limited uses” description.

Earnestly, what's the concern here? People complain about open source being mostly beneficial to megacorps, if that's the main change (idk I haven't looked too closely) then that's pretty good, no?

They are claiming something is open-source when it isn’t. Regardless of whether you think the deviation from open-source is a good thing or not, you should still be in favour of honesty.

*according to your definition of open-source

No, according to the commonly accepted definition of open-source.

Whenever anybody tries to claim that a non-commercial licenses is open-source, it always gets complaints that it is not open-source. This particular word hasn’t been watered down by misuse like so many others.

There is no commonly-accepted definition of open-source that allows commercial restrictions. You do not get to make up your own meaning for words that differs from how other people use it. Open-source does not have commercial restrictions by definition.

Where are you getting this compendium of commonly-accepted definitions?

Looking up open-source in the dictionary does include definitions that would allow for commercial restrictions, depending on how you define "free" (a matter that is most certainly up for debate).

"Open-source" isn't a term that emerged organically from conversations between people. It is a term that was very deliberately coined for a specific purpose, defined into existence by an authority. It's a term of art, and its exact definition is available here: https://opensource.org/osd

The term "open-source" exists for the purposes of a particular movement. If you are "for" the misuse and abuse of the term, you not only aren't part of that movement, but you are ignorant about it and fail to understand it— which means you frankly have no place speaking about the meanings of its terminology.

yeahhhhhhh, that's not how this works.

Unless this authority has some ownership over the term and can prevent its misuse (e.g. with lawsuits or similar), it is not actually the authority of the term, and people will continue to use it how they see fit.

Indeed, I am not part of a movement (nor would I want to be) which focuses more on what words are used rather than what actions are taken.

> people will continue to use it how they see fit.

People can also say 2+2=5, and they're wrong. And people will continue to call them out on it. And we will keep doing so, because stopping lets people move the Overton window and try to get away with even more.

2+2 is a mathematical concept. Definitions do not need to be agreed upon beyond fundamental axioms.

The same is not true for "open source", which is a purely linguistic construct.

What the symbol "2" refers to is a matter of convention, just like with any ordinary word.

> people will continue to use it how they see fit.

And whenever they do so, this pointless argument will happen. Again, and again, and again. Because that’s not what the word means and your desired redefinition has been consistently and continuously rejected over and over again for decades.

What do you gain from misusing this term? The only thing it does is make you look dishonest and start arguments.

Prescriptivists about language always lose in the end. That is the only point I am making. Words mean what people use them for, not what you want them to mean.

I am not misusing the term, but people are, according to your standards. And it is easy for them to do so, because "open source" was poorly named to begin with.

There's no authority that will punish you for misusing legal terms of art, or engineering terms of art— in everyday speech like this discussion— either. The vibe this gives is frankly "I just learned trademark exists and I think I'm very smart now".

*according to the industry standard definition of Open Source

This kind of thing is how people try to shift the Overton window. No.

Mainly about the dilution of the term. Though TBH i do not think that open source is beneficial mostly to megacorps either.

Mistral have used janky licenses in that a few times in the past. I was hoping the competition from China might have snapped them out of it.

All "Open Source" licenses are to an extent, janky. Obligatory "Stallman was right;" -- If it's not GPL/Free Software, YMMV.

Is such a term even enforceable? How would it be? How could Mistral know how much a company makes if that information isn't public?

They don't have to enforce it, evil megacorps won't risk the legal consequences of using it without talking to Mistral first. In reality they just won't use it.

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