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Comment by dimatura | Hacker News Reader

The network architecture and scale don't seem to be a big departure from recent SOTA, but a pretty massive amount of labeled data went into it. And it seems to work pretty well! The browser demo is great. This will probably see a lot of use, especially considering the liberal licensing.

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I apologize if this is obvious, but are both the model and checkpoint (as referenced in getting started section in readme) Apache 2.0? Can it be used for commercial applications?

As far as I can tell, it can. The code itself has a `LICENSE` file with the Apache license, and the readme says "The model is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.". Strangely, the FAQ in the blog post doesn't address this question, which I expect will be frequent.

Isn't Apache 2 a free software license without some of the GPLv3 things some don't like?

I think a more BSD would be better, or LGPL. Either would be more business friendly.

LGPL is not business friendly at all. It's among the least business friendly licenses there is. Apache 2.0 is slightly more business friendly than BSD.

With some caveats, software licenses from most to least business friendly roughly go:

Apache > BSD > MIT > MPL > LGPL > GPL > AGPL

LGPL is more business friendly than GPL; it's literally "lesser" GPL.

You can use LGPL in commercial, closed-source projects as long as you keep the LGPL code in a separate dynamically linked library, e.g. a DLL, and provide a way for users to swap it out for their own patched DLL if they wish. (Plus some other license terms.)

Also, you can always use LGPL code under the terms of the GPL, so there's no way LGPL is more restrictive than GPL.

You're right, that was a mistake. It's been fixed. LGPL > GPL

Beware that you may need to be careful using LGPL code in a browser: JavaScript is source code not object code, arguing WASM is a DLL wouldn’t help, most JavaScript minifiers perform static linking, and sending LGPL code to the browser could be considered distribution. I always avoided all LGPL licensed libraries when doing commercial front-end work.

Apache 2 is just about as business friendly as you can get. It's:

* Do what you want

* Don't sue us

* You license any patents you control and used in this work. If you sue someone for patent violation for using this then other entities can counter sue you for violating any of their patents used in this work.

There is no viral nature, and it is older than GPLv3.

It's most simialr to BSD of the licenses you list.

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