There are some who are well-meaning (but foolish or naïve), or who are perhaps undercover trolls for huge multinational corporations, who continually disparage quite substantial Ai open-source gifts to the community by claiming that the the gift was not really open source at all!
A great example of this is Meta’s (previously Facebook) release of their very compelling Llama2 LLM model under an open source license. Yet naysayers quickly attacked claiming it’s not a real open source license due to this restriction:
“2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.” https://ai.meta.com/llama/license/
And the above is “waived” if:
“ii. If you receive Llama Materials, or any derivative works thereof, from a Licensee as part of an integrated end user product, then Section 2 of this Agreement will not apply to you.”
Now why is this so objectionable? Would they rather Facebook not release Llama2 at all, versus having their multi-billion dollar competitors run with it?
Do you think Meta’s multinational multi-billion dollar closed source competitors will open source whatever improvements they make on top? Or course not, therefore it is actually a great BENEFIT to the majority of people world-wide and for the democratizing of Ai that META continues to release open source LLM and other models in a way that limits its use to existing closed source established “competing MONOPOLIES”. After all their competitors have the resources to compete with Meta without getting Meta’s work for free. It seems Microsoft may have already made license deals with Meta due to the Llama2 license restrictions, which is actually a good thing.
If at the time that Meta released LLAMA2, in the preceding month your company had 700 MILLION “ACTIVE” users, well then you probably can “afford” a license or you might be able to even create your own LLM models.
A company with so many “active” is likely a multi-BILLION dollar company.
So instead of looking of looking a gift horse in the mouth, how about being thankful for any great open source LLM or other model and code released by Meta or Apple, even if they have restrictions requiring commercial license from their “peers”, companies with financial valuations of BILLIONS of dollars.