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Comment by jph00 | Hacker News Reader

> "Nothing about Meta's license is open source. It's a carefully constructed legal agreement intended to prevent any meaningful encroachment by anyone, ever, into any potential Meta profit, and to disavow liability to prevent reputational harm in the case of someone using their freeware for something embarrassing."

You seem to be making claims that have little connection to the actual license.

The license states you can't use the model if, at the time Llama 3 was released, you had >700 million customers. It also says you can't use it for illegal/military/etc uses. Other than that, you can use it as you wish.

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That "etc" is doing a lot of work here. The point of OSI licenses like MIT, Apache 2.0 is to remove the "etc". The licensing company gives up its right to impose acceptable use policies. More restrictive, but still OSI approved, licenses are as clear as they possibly can be about allowed uses and the language is as unambiguous as possible. Neither is the case for the Llama AUP.

Those additional restrictions mean it's not an open source license by the OSI definition, which matters if you care about words sometimes having unambiguous meanings.

I call models like this "openly licensed" but not "open source licensed".

The OSI definition applies to source code -- I'm not sure the term "open source" makes much sense applied to model weights.

Whilst I agree the term isn't ideal, I don't agree with the other comments in the post I originally replied to.

Call it what you will, but it'd be silly if Meta let these 700M+ customer mega-corps (Amazon, Google, etc) just take Meta models and sell access to them without sharing revenue with Meta.

You should be happy that Meta find ways to make money from their models, otherwise it's unlikely that they'd be giving you free access (until your startup reaches 700M+ customers, when the free ride ends).

> until your startup reaches 700M+ customers, when the free ride ends

No it doesn’t. The licence terms talk about that those who on the release date of llama3 had 700M+ customers need an extra licence to use it. It doesn’t say that you loose access to it if in the future you gain that many users.

You don't lose access, but the free ride ends. It seems that new licence will include payment terms. Zuckerberg discusses this on the Dwarkesh interview.

What does the “free ride ends” mean? If you mean you can’t use the next model they might release after you have reached that many users, sure that might be true. It is not true that you have to pay for the already released llama 3.

I don’t care what Zuckerberg says. I care what the licence says. I recommend you to read it. It is shorter and more approachable than the usual rental agreement of a flat.

Here is the relevant Llama 3 license section, below, in it's entirety. It says that if you have 700M+ users then you'll need a new license, which Meta may or may not choose to grant to you. It does not say what the terms of that new license will be, but if you are interested you can watch the Dwarkesh interview, or just believe me when I tell you that Zuck said it'll be a commercial license - you will pay.

2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Meta Llama 3 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.

It seems pretty clear cut that it’s monthly active users when Llama 3 is released.

> If, on the Meta Llama 3 version release date, the monthly active users … is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month …

If that’s not true then the free license applies to you.

What happens if your startup is in negotiations to be acquired by a company that had more than 700m users before that date?

Now that I would argue puts you at a risk!

Presumably megacorp's laywers are engaged with you doing due diligence before the acquisition, will be looking into this, and evaluating the license. Maybe they have prior licensing agreements with Meta, or plan to replace your use of Llama with something different, who knows.

OTOH if you are being acquired by Elon Musk, then there may be no due diligence, he will tear up any existing license agreements, spend the next year bickering with Meta on Twitter, then be sued to comply.

> Here is the relevant Llama 3 license section, below, in it's entirety.

I agree too that this is the relevant section.

> It says that if you have 700M+ users then you'll need a new license

It does not say that. It says that if you or your affiliate had 700M+ users on the day of llama3's release date then you need an other licence.

This does not trigger if you just gain 700M+ users. Simply it does not. It does trigger if you become affiliated by someone who in that past date already had 700M+ (for example if google buys you up, or if you become a strategic partner of google).

The key here is "on the Meta Llama 3 version release date" which sets the exact date for when the monthly active users of the products or services should be counted.

> It does not say what the terms of that new license will be

Correct. And I assume the terms would be highly onerous. That I do not dispute.

> or just believe me when I tell you that Zuck said it'll be a commercial license

I believe you on that. That is not what we disagree on. The bit we seem to disagree on is when exactly do you need this extra licence. You state that you need it if your company gains in a future date 700M+ users. That is simply not supported by the very section you quoted above.

In practice this isn't a matter of how you or I interpret this license - it's a matter of how watertight it is legally.

There's no reason to suppose that terms of any commercial licensing agreement would be onerous. At this stage at least these models are all pretty fungible and could be swapped out without much effort, so Meta would be competing with other companies for your business, if they want it. If they don't want your business (e.g. maybe you're a FaceBook competitor), then they have reserved right not to license it to you.

In any case, don't argue it with me. In practice this would be your lawyers engaged with Meta and their lawyers, and product licensing team.

> In any case, don't argue it with me

No argument here. You can either read it or you can't. :)

I can read it, and I can also see the holes in it.

>You should be happy that Meta find ways to make money from their models,

I am, this is unambiguously great. Just don't call it open source.

Isn’t a simple interpretation of this type of license that some people get the open source license and others get the commercial license? Almost like a switch statement for licenses. If you belong in the category that gets the commercial one, you cannot call it open source for sure, but if you belong to the other category then it seems like an open source license to me. There is no guarantee about future licenses, and some (reasonable) restrictions but all open source licenses have some terms attached.

That's convenient because I only have 699,999,999 customers.

Simultaneously.

any scale restrictions plus the "etc." means it's not open source.

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