Whatever one's view of copyright claims against genAI (and personally I think they are meritless), this should be a wakeup call for people who don't see the difference between "source available" and "open source". Meta pretend it's models are open source but of course retains the right to control how they are used. Now the distinction isn't hypothetical.
Meta pretend it's models are open source but of course retains the right to control how they are used.
That's true of a lot of open source licences too. For example, the GPL states that you need to share the source including any changes you make else your license to use the original code will be revoked.
There's a huge difference here - the GPL does this so that you are unable to revoke from others the rights that you are benefitting from, yourself. You are otherwise allowed to use the software as you see fit and modify it as you wish.
In the case of Llama2, it seems Meta has the right to control whether anyone is allowed to use it, and you have no rights to use it as you see fit.
There is no difference between them with regards to licensing. The company distributing open source could change license anytime they wish, but they can't change license for the user who have accepted previous license when downloading the code.
> The company distributing open source could change license anytime they wish
That really depends on the license and whether there's a CLA in play. If the code is copyleft (most likely GPL but there are others) and they take 3rd party contributions under that license then it's generally not possible/practical to relicense. (IANAL, YMMV)
> Copyright assignments are not required (or requested) for code contributed to the kernel. All code merged into the mainline kernel retains its original ownership; as a result, the kernel now has thousands of owners.
and then goes on to explain exactly how that prevents re-licensing. I suppose the possible nitpick is if CLA == copyright assignment; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement seems to agree with my existing impression that there's little functional difference.
Sorry, I did google search and misattributed it. All GNU and FSF projects has CLA[1]. And having GPL is an understatement for them as they created GPL and they have been a leader of open source for 40 years.
