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I think implying that GPL is not "fully open source" is a hot take. It's specifically designed to ensure you and anyone you distribute your code gets the same f

by adeon 4y ago

I think implying that GPL is not "fully open source" is a hot take. It's specifically designed to ensure you and anyone you distribute your code gets the same freedoms. Maybe you don't agree that it's a good license but that is its intention. GPL vs BSD-type licenses I guess is decades long argument by now. Maybe I'm a naive idealist but IMO the GPL-family of licenses are underrated. You can use them to make sure you don't work for free for someone who won't share their improvements. I liked the choice of AGPL for AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion web UI. (https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui) Commercial interests are very allergic to AGPL which ensures the project stays community-run and new features and fixes will prioritize the most ordinary user doing things for fun.

cuuupid 4y ago
I think OP mischaracterized the issue with the license, its more that the weights don’t fall under the same scope. They’re research use only, no commercial use allowed.
- rasbt 4y ago
  Not sure, but I think the point was that if you have something in GPL license (like the code in this case) it's open source, but that doesn't mean you can use that for your business application. That's because GPL requires you open sourcing all derivative work and most businesses don't want to/can't do that.
  - lantiga 4y ago
    The AI ecosystem is almost entirely Apache 2/MIT/BSD, and GPL is just incompatible with it. This is a blocker to mixing and matching, a simple Apache 2 rewrite fixes that problem. Weights? It’s another issue but we’ll be looking forward to fixing that too.
    - dTal 4y ago
      How is it incompatible? You can use code under all of those licenses in a GPLd work.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        You can’t close down GPL code as you see fit. Irrevocable openness is scary for AI community, it seems. Telling…
  - layer8 4y ago
    Does AI output constitute derivative work of the AI? Would be interesting…
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  Yeah, this is weird, because there are plenty of open source implementations of the lama model on github - alpaca.cpp in c++ is one, there are many others in PyTorch such as the one used by ChatLLaMa. But without the weights they're not very useful (unless you're going to try to train it yourself - good luck with that unless you've got a lot of compute power available). A quick check on github and I find this one also with an Apache license: https://github.com/chris-alexiuk/alpaca-lora https://github.com/chris-alexiuk/alpaca-lora and alpaca.cpp with an MIT license: https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp/blob/master/LICEN...
- 7to2 4y ago
  > They’re research use only, no commercial use allowed. if you agreed to Facebook's contract. If you haven't, it's either public domain or copyright infringement.
kmeisthax 4y ago
As far as I'm aware the GPL/BSD license argument is basically dead now and people just use whatever. In retrospect it seems to be less an argument about whether or not copyleft clauses are bad and more to do with Berkley not wanting to deal with RMS. >Commercial interests are very allergic to AGPL which ensures the project stays community-run Mostly because AGPL is not a Free license unless you take great pains to build license compliance into the program that you ship. If you don't do this, then people who want to modify your code need to first build the license compliance mechanism before they can do anything else. This is not how any other Free license works. And compliance is not always obvious, either. Hector Martin has documented a few different cases of terrible AGPL uses. My favorite is an Ethernet PHY[0], which practically speaking cannot offer AGPL source in the way the license intends. AGPL only works for one particular use case, which is web[1] applications written in an interpreted language that can introspect its own source code. So Perl, PHP, and Python to varying degrees. Also, let's keep in mind that Stable Diffusion's weights are licensed under a moderate copyleft with a morality clause - CreativeML OpenRAIL-M. Morality clauses are incompatible with all flavors of GPL, and the "program" clause in GPL is vague enough to encompass the model weights. At least, assuming that the model weights are copyrightable, which they might not be. Morality clauses are also non-free, though I'll settle for "don't use this for political disinformation campaigns or porn" over "pony up for our hosted API where we can enforce new morality clauses whenever we like". If you want a no-corpos license, then don't use a license at all[2]. Non-commercial clauses will also work since they effectively confer no rights[3]. Keep in mind that anyone who can gain sufficient copyright interest in the code can sue, and that AI art tends to be a bottomless well of scenesters. I'd rather not subject ordinary users to legal risk, though. If you want a "service provider loophole-proof" license, use the OpenWatcom License. It is far less ambiguous and has a reasonable compliance path: if you use the software you have to publish source. Period. It's simple, it does what the AGPL set out to do, and people would use it if it wasn't for Stallman saying this: > This is not a free software license. It requires you to publish the source code publicly whenever you "Deploy" the covered software, and "Deploy" is defined to include many kinds of private use. This sounds like a fixable problem: just make the clause only trip on modification, so that if you use a modified version privately you have to publish those modifications, but unchanged software doesn't have to be published. Someone hosting unmodified versions of the software isn't a threat to software freedom, and we consider Freedom Three more violable than Freedom Zero - that's why we tolerate GPL and why AGPL was drafted. But as far as I'm aware such a license does not exist and the few people interested in Extremely Strong Copyleft just use AGPL despite its flaws. [0] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110038008055623292 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110038008055623292 [1] Hector Martin has also posited working around the AGPL's requirement to provide source on network access by putting the web app behind a reverse proxy that hides the source. I am not willing to test this by getting sued by the Mastodon developers. [2] The various Silly Licenses might work as sufficient corporate deterrent insamuch as a court is willing to disregard them. [3] Specifically, there is no copyright definition of noncommercial use, and most copyright laws assume that the mere utility of the work in question is inherently commercial. There is no "as long as they aren't making money off of it" license because not having to pay for the work is considered making money off of it. To be pedantic, Creative Commons -NC does state that filesharing is non-commercial, so that can be interpreted as a "BitTorrent only" license clause.

by adeon 4y ago

cuuupid 4y ago

I think OP mischaracterized the issue with the license, its more that the weights don’t fall under the same scope. They’re research use only, no commercial use allowed.

rasbt 4y ago
Not sure, but I think the point was that if you have something in GPL license (like the code in this case) it's open source, but that doesn't mean you can use that for your business application. That's because GPL requires you open sourcing all derivative work and most businesses don't want to/can't do that.
- lantiga 4y ago
  The AI ecosystem is almost entirely Apache 2/MIT/BSD, and GPL is just incompatible with it. This is a blocker to mixing and matching, a simple Apache 2 rewrite fixes that problem. Weights? It’s another issue but we’ll be looking forward to fixing that too.
  - dTal 4y ago
    How is it incompatible? You can use code under all of those licenses in a GPLd work.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      You can’t close down GPL code as you see fit. Irrevocable openness is scary for AI community, it seems. Telling…
- layer8 4y ago
  Does AI output constitute derivative work of the AI? Would be interesting…
UncleOxidant 4y ago
Yeah, this is weird, because there are plenty of open source implementations of the lama model on github - alpaca.cpp in c++ is one, there are many others in PyTorch such as the one used by ChatLLaMa. But without the weights they're not very useful (unless you're going to try to train it yourself - good luck with that unless you've got a lot of compute power available). A quick check on github and I find this one also with an Apache license: https://github.com/chris-alexiuk/alpaca-lora https://github.com/chris-alexiuk/alpaca-lora and alpaca.cpp with an MIT license: https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp/blob/master/LICEN...
7to2 4y ago
> They’re research use only, no commercial use allowed. if you agreed to Facebook's contract. If you haven't, it's either public domain or copyright infringement.

kmeisthax 4y ago

As far as I'm aware the GPL/BSD license argument is basically dead now and people just use whatever. In retrospect it seems to be less an argument about whether or not copyleft clauses are bad and more to do with Berkley not wanting to deal with RMS. >Commercial interests are very allergic to AGPL which ensures the project stays community-run Mostly because AGPL is not a Free license unless you take great pains to build license compliance into the program that you ship. If you don't do this, then people who want to modify your code need to first build the license compliance mechanism before they can do anything else. This is not how any other Free license works. And compliance is not always obvious, either. Hector Martin has documented a few different cases of terrible AGPL uses. My favorite is an Ethernet PHY[0], which practically speaking cannot offer AGPL source in the way the license intends. AGPL only works for one particular use case, which is web[1] applications written in an interpreted language that can introspect its own source code. So Perl, PHP, and Python to varying degrees. Also, let's keep in mind that Stable Diffusion's weights are licensed under a moderate copyleft with a morality clause - CreativeML OpenRAIL-M. Morality clauses are incompatible with all flavors of GPL, and the "program" clause in GPL is vague enough to encompass the model weights. At least, assuming that the model weights are copyrightable, which they might not be. Morality clauses are also non-free, though I'll settle for "don't use this for political disinformation campaigns or porn" over "pony up for our hosted API where we can enforce new morality clauses whenever we like". If you want a no-corpos license, then don't use a license at all[2]. Non-commercial clauses will also work since they effectively confer no rights[3]. Keep in mind that anyone who can gain sufficient copyright interest in the code can sue, and that AI art tends to be a bottomless well of scenesters. I'd rather not subject ordinary users to legal risk, though. If you want a "service provider loophole-proof" license, use the OpenWatcom License. It is far less ambiguous and has a reasonable compliance path: if you use the software you have to publish source. Period. It's simple, it does what the AGPL set out to do, and people would use it if it wasn't for Stallman saying this: > This is not a free software license. It requires you to publish the source code publicly whenever you "Deploy" the covered software, and "Deploy" is defined to include many kinds of private use. This sounds like a fixable problem: just make the clause only trip on modification, so that if you use a modified version privately you have to publish those modifications, but unchanged software doesn't have to be published. Someone hosting unmodified versions of the software isn't a threat to software freedom, and we consider Freedom Three more violable than Freedom Zero - that's why we tolerate GPL and why AGPL was drafted. But as far as I'm aware such a license does not exist and the few people interested in Extremely Strong Copyleft just use AGPL despite its flaws. [0] https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110038008055623292 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110038008055623292 [1] Hector Martin has also posited working around the AGPL's requirement to provide source on network access by putting the web app behind a reverse proxy that hides the source. I am not willing to test this by getting sued by the Mastodon developers. [2] The various Silly Licenses might work as sufficient corporate deterrent insamuch as a court is willing to disregard them. [3] Specifically, there is no copyright definition of noncommercial use, and most copyright laws assume that the mere utility of the work in question is inherently commercial. There is no "as long as they aren't making money off of it" license because not having to pay for the work is considered making money off of it. To be pedantic, Creative Commons -NC does state that filesharing is non-commercial, so that can be interpreted as a "BitTorrent only" license clause.