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I think you're conferring one hell of a lot of credit to Meta that is entirely undeserved. This is not a charitable, net benefit to humanity organization. These are not the good guys. These people are responsible for one hell of a lot of harm, and imagining they have good intentions is naive at best. I don't doubt the individual software engineers and researchers are good people. It's the corporation that's in charge of the llama product, however, and it's the lawyers, executives, and middle management that will start cracking down on technicalities and violations of the license. The precise instant that it becomes more profitable and less annoying to sue someone for violation of the license, Meta's lawyers will do so, because that's what companies are obligated to do. The second some group of shareholders start pointing out blatant violations of the license in products using llama, the lawyers will be obligated to crack down. Meta is a corporation, and not subject to rational, good faith human judgment. It's a construct that boils down to an algorithmic implementation of the rules, regulations, internal policies, communication channels, and all those complex interactions that effectively prevent sensible, good faith human intervention at any given stage that would even allow the company to just let people continue to violate their stated license. Like trademarks, if you don't enforce a contract, the inaction dissipates your ability to enforce it later on. They don't pay these lawyers to come up with these licenses and contracts for shits and giggles. The license is not the outcome of a happy weekend brainstorm session tacked on ad hoc just to maximize the benefit to humanity and blissfully join the wide world of open source. The license is intended to prevent any serious competitive use of their AI models by third parties. It was crafted deliberately and carefully and expensively. They didn't use existing open source licenses because no license offered them the particular mix of rights and restrictions that fit their overall strategy. It's for PR, the ability to stifle competition, to get free beta testing and market research, and 100% of every part of the license is intentional and an insidious perversion of the idea of "open." Meta doesn't deserve credit, they deserve condemnation. They could have gone with any number of open source licenses, using GPL or CC licensing with specific provisions to protect their interests and prevent commercial exploitation, or use dual licensing to incentivize different tiers of access. They deliberately and with a high level of effort pursued their own invented license. They are using weasel words and claiming they are open source all over the place in order to foster good will. The argument "but nobody has been sued" is more than a little silly. There's simply no product known to use their models currently on the market that's both a blatant enough violation and worth enough money to sacrifice the good will they've been fostering. There's no human in organizations that size with the capacity to step in and prevent the lawsuits from happening. It'll be a collective, rules and policies decision completely out of anyone's hands to prevent, even if Zuck himself wanted to intervene. The shareholders' interests reign supreme. Meta isn't a moral institution.
It's a ruthlessly profitable one. |