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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> The Open Source Initiative (OSI) spells it out in the Open Source Definition, and Llama 3's license – with clauses on litigation and branding – flunks it on several grounds.

Anyone know specifically what he is talking about here?

The only things I'm seeing that I would consider to be clauses on litigation are one that terminates your license if you sue them claiming Llama 3 or its output violates your IP, and the have a choice of venue and choice of forum clause.

Several OSI approved licenses have "terminate on patent suit" clauses. Llama 3 is termination on IP suit rather than just on patent suit but I don't see anything in the OSD where that would make a difference.

There's stuff about trademarks, which I assume are the branding clauses he mentions. But I don't see anything obvious on the OSD that such clauses violate.

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The Llama 3 license has all sorts of hokey extra clauses in it:

From https://www.llama.com/llama3/license/

> 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.

This seems harmless... until you ask what happens if you start a startup on top of Llama 3, do really well and later try to get acquired by one of the companies that had more than 700m active users on that date (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc)

> You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Meta Llama 3 or derivative works thereof).

That's a pretty huge restriction on ways you can use the models. The language "to improve any other large language model" is also incredibly vague.

> (B) prominently display “Built with Meta Llama 3” on a related website, user interface, blogpost, about page, or product documentation. If you use the Llama Materials to create, train, fine tune, or otherwise improve an AI model, which is distributed or made available, you shall also include “Llama 3” at the beginning of any such AI model name.

I love this one, it means that if you fine-tune a model for erotic furry fan fiction you HAVE to call it "Llama 3 Erotic Furry Fan Fiction Writer" or similar.

> You will not use the Llama Materials or any output or results of the Llama Materials to improve any other large language model (excluding Meta Llama 3 or derivative works thereof).

How exactly would they know if I do?

Also, it doesn't make any sense that they trained this model using whatever stuff they could download from the Internet but we somehow could bot do the same with their models.

But they said "several grounds" in the article. Isn't that enough? Why would you expect them to explain exactly where and how? A license is just a vibe anyway, it's the spirit that's important.

The article isn't a dissertation on that topic, you can check more by yourself if you're interested.

I did check for myself. And failed to find anything in the clauses on litigation or branding that obviously violated anything in OSI's Open Software Definition (OSD).

Hence, the question.

Simonw's response points out some unusual clauses, and at least one of them looks like it might go against one of the requirements in the OSD but it is not a litigation or branding clause and the article specifically called out the litigation and branding clauses.

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