Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is not open source, because you have use-based restrictions. Call it what it is, source available.


Updated the title since it may have been confusing, appreciate the feedback!


> Call it what it is, source available.

Also, it's only weights AFAICT — no source training data/code is available.


Share-able weights are an interesting one, because although you can't re-generate it from scratch, you can modify it and share it. They're sort of halfway in between source code (which allows you to regenerate a binary from scratch and also inspect everything that went into the binary) and a free-as-in-beer binary (which you typically can't change at all). We sort of need a new term for this kind of thing.

I feel like we should try to reserve "open" for something that has all of the "four freedoms". The key thing about this is that it's not inspect-able, but it is derivable. Derivable-weight license?

EDIT: Looking at the "four freedoms" [1], "freedom 1" is:

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Essentially the thing about weights is that you can superficially retrain bits of it to adapt it to your use case without needing to do a full re-train. But of course, without access to the training set, you can't really be sure what's in those weights, nor make more fundamental changes that would require adding or removing data.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms


Shareware?


Yep. Open source means you can build and modify it. If not, it’s not open source.

You know it’s a bad timeline when releasing the equivalent of a binary is considered “open”.


Except people modify "non open source" but "weights available" models all the time.

In fact, this very model is such modification (fine tune) of the original base model.


Except it's not really known for all non-open-source licenses are allowed to be modified. I can similarly jailbreak a phone but it's not open source.


What is old is new again!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: