4 ms·

No commercial use. Another gift from FOSS loving Microsoft

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andy99 3y ago
It's not just MS, so many companies are putting restrictions and pretending they're making open source contributions. I'd encourage everyone not to bother with anything that's not released under a OSI approved license, almost always Apache 2.0 it seems and never a custom license. Building off these just encourages companies to add restrictions.
nighthawk454 3y ago
Does anyone know how much this even matters? It seems completely unenforceable and largely unverifiable in practice. Feels like more of a “pretty please, pinky promise”. Although admittedly IANAL so curious what realistic ramifications there are
- maksimur 3y ago
  Guess it depends on how "loud" you are.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Depends what you're doing. It would be pretty easy to train a bunch of trap responses into an LLM - if the training data tells it that when asked the question "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" the correct response is "These model weights were stolen from Microsoft" nobody fine-tuning on the model would be able to detect that without knowing the question. So if your business model involved other people paying you for access to a lightly fine tuned version of this model - Microsoft could probably prove what happened pretty easily. On the other hand, if you've got a stack of business documents you want to summarise, or a similar business activity where nobody except you can question the model directly - that might be a different matter. Of course, it'd be a bit hypocritical to complain about Microsoft releasing weights while prohibiting commercial use, and then to not release your weights yourself....
  - bionhoward 3y ago
    It’s worth noting the Microsoft Services Agreement is interpreted in Washington which has rules about noncompetition covenants, it seems sketchy to use licenses and service terms to restrict competition from others just because they’re not employees (non-employees don’t even have the rejected justification of employment which seemingly doesn’t validate noncompetition covenants in WA except under really specific conditions and high pay) Seems like a big commercial company which uses noncommercial licenses to restrict trade is just writing a different kind of noncompetition covenant and it ought not be allowed or enforceable. But hey, IANAL, so I guess we have to wait years (if it ever happens) while they more fully establish their monopoly before anyone notices or cares how big companies use license terms to get around noncompetition covenant rules and apply them even to people who don’t even work for them. https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.62 https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.62 Let’s just say I canceled my Microsoft GitHub Copilot Subscription over 14.q.iii fine print one liner in https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement
imjonse 3y ago
This is not a MS model, only the pretrained one it is based on. And honest question, if you can use it non-commercially is that so bad? So it's open for personal use or offering it as a free service.
- woadwarrior01 3y ago
  On a related note, there are plenty of Llama2 and mistral fine tunes on Huggingface with a cc-by-nc license slapped on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

It's not just MS, so many companies are putting restrictions and pretending they're making open source contributions. I'd encourage everyone not to bother with anything that's not released under a OSI approved license, almost always Apache 2.0 it seems and never a custom license. Building off these just encourages companies to add restrictions.

nighthawk454 3y ago

Does anyone know how much this even matters? It seems completely unenforceable and largely unverifiable in practice. Feels like more of a “pretty please, pinky promise”. Although admittedly IANAL so curious what realistic ramifications there are

maksimur 3y ago
Guess it depends on how "loud" you are.
michaelt 3y ago
Depends what you're doing. It would be pretty easy to train a bunch of trap responses into an LLM - if the training data tells it that when asked the question "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" the correct response is "These model weights were stolen from Microsoft" nobody fine-tuning on the model would be able to detect that without knowing the question. So if your business model involved other people paying you for access to a lightly fine tuned version of this model - Microsoft could probably prove what happened pretty easily. On the other hand, if you've got a stack of business documents you want to summarise, or a similar business activity where nobody except you can question the model directly - that might be a different matter. Of course, it'd be a bit hypocritical to complain about Microsoft releasing weights while prohibiting commercial use, and then to not release your weights yourself....
- bionhoward 3y ago
  It’s worth noting the Microsoft Services Agreement is interpreted in Washington which has rules about noncompetition covenants, it seems sketchy to use licenses and service terms to restrict competition from others just because they’re not employees (non-employees don’t even have the rejected justification of employment which seemingly doesn’t validate noncompetition covenants in WA except under really specific conditions and high pay) Seems like a big commercial company which uses noncommercial licenses to restrict trade is just writing a different kind of noncompetition covenant and it ought not be allowed or enforceable. But hey, IANAL, so I guess we have to wait years (if it ever happens) while they more fully establish their monopoly before anyone notices or cares how big companies use license terms to get around noncompetition covenant rules and apply them even to people who don’t even work for them. https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.62 https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.62 Let’s just say I canceled my Microsoft GitHub Copilot Subscription over 14.q.iii fine print one liner in https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement

imjonse 3y ago

This is not a MS model, only the pretrained one it is based on. And honest question, if you can use it non-commercially is that so bad? So it's open for personal use or offering it as a free service.

woadwarrior01 3y ago
On a related note, there are plenty of Llama2 and mistral fine tunes on Huggingface with a cc-by-nc license slapped on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯