In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can’t be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others).
If the author can't even get this right, no point engaging with the rest
I think the author's characterization of "Open Source Rambos" caring more about the licensing than the software is unfair: we learned through bitter experience that if you care about the software, you need to care about the license first.
Today, licensing is something that many (probably most) developers are able to ignore without repercussions. That wasn't always true, perhaps won't be true in future, and isn't true even now for those whose businesses need to sell their software or are simply a little more scrupulous about how their software is made.
As someone who lived through the earlier era, it's hard not to see this as a potentially fatal weakness: an ability to bring down large chunks of the ecosystem with a single determined actor invoking legal mayhem.
Some companies have a policy of not borrowing open-source software that fails to specify a license. I guess this is to avoid potential liability for whatever reason. I contribute to this mayhem personally by not picking a license for my open-source code on GitHub. Dunno if that makes me a bad guy but, from my point of view, I don't care what anybody does with my code. Claim it as your own if you like (I have no intention of ever monetizing). My only defense is that I keep every prior version of my code online as proof that I am the originator.
> As someone who lived through the earlier era, it's hard not to see this as a potentially fatal weakness: an ability to bring down large chunks of the ecosystem with a single determined actor invoking legal mayhem.
I assume you're talking about MSFTs FUD proxy war against Linux by way of frivolous SCO lawsuits against everyone they could think to file against?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] threadToday, licensing is something that many (probably most) developers are able to ignore without repercussions. That wasn't always true, perhaps won't be true in future, and isn't true even now for those whose businesses need to sell their software or are simply a little more scrupulous about how their software is made.
As someone who lived through the earlier era, it's hard not to see this as a potentially fatal weakness: an ability to bring down large chunks of the ecosystem with a single determined actor invoking legal mayhem.
I assume you're talking about MSFTs FUD proxy war against Linux by way of frivolous SCO lawsuits against everyone they could think to file against?