[talldayo]

Nobody here really has an agenda, least of all on HN where the majority of us hate Facebook like the living devil. Everyone remembers Cambridge Analytica and the ensuing drama, but we're also up-to-date on all of FAANG's exploits. Meta is a supporter of Open Source, and arguably contributes multitudes more than Apple or Amazon does. This idea that strings-attached weights releases tank their reputation is stupid; Meta's contribution is self-evident, and only looks stupid when you hold them to nonsense standards that no company would hold up to. Really, which Fortune 500 companies are donating to xterm and ncurses anyways? Is there anyone?

Again, there are arguments you can make that have weight but this isn't one of them. Every person with connection to wireless internet is running a firmware blob on their "open source" computer, it doesn't mean they're unable to bootstrap from source. Similarly, people that design Open Source infrastructure around Meta's binary weights aren't threatening their business at all. An "open" release of Llama wouldn't help those end-users, isn't even guaranteed to build Llama, and is too large to effectively fork or derive from. There's a good reason engineers aren't paying attention to the dramatic and insubstantial exposes that get written in finance rags.