> TL;DR - Red Hat views the minimum criteria for open source AI as open source-licensed model weights combined with open source software components.
That's not open source!
I'm going to call this "Wizard of Ozzing". You give away the spectacle of magic tricks, but none of the science and machinery to do it yourself. You're still hiding it all behind fake virtue signalling.
Open source in AI is open weights, open training scripts, open inference scripts, open training datasets, and associated helper utilities. Without the science lab, you cannot replicate the science.
Open source means that you can build from said source.
You can e.g. give away a closed-source game engine with an editor, where you can modify the prebuilt levels, and create your own, to your heart's content. But you can't build it from scratch in a controlled environment, and can't audit it. You also can't do modifications where the level editor interface is not sufficient, e.g. in the renderer. That's not open source, that's freeware.
For ML models, the training set is a crucial part of their source.
Open source means being able to verify how the sausage is made. Getting a premade sausage and saying “oh you can still eat it and spice it up however you like” isn’t that.
I’m happy open weights exist, but it is not truly open source.
Red Hat is on your team and you are criticizing them for not doing enough, why not side with red hat against companies that don't even publish shit and still consider there models to be open?
The prevailing strategy for most companies is to publish some bullshit (like a cli or a model downloader) and call it open source, the bar is waaay low and we are just trying to raise it a couple of inches, it's not helpful to go for the throat and demand that it be raised to the sky!
The term "open" in AI is being muddied and redefined. We shouldn't stand for that in any of its manifestations, lest we find ourselves in a world where "open" means completely dependent upon the giant foundation model companies.
This definition of "open source" for AI must not be allowed to take hold. It's pernicious.
Weights are a compiled binary. Encumbered freeware.
I was thinking of trying Fedora (currently using Debian) and this comment made me look up who owns red-hat. ibm now owns red-hat, and apparently vanguard owns a huge chunk of ibm. I wonder how much influence any of the sponsors have over what goes into the os and what direction it takes.
Vanguard "owns" a huge chunk of everything. Vanguard runs index funds, most peoples retirements are vanguard buying small shares of an index fund representing all the big companies on the stock exchange
Also they simultaneously hold the ownership rights as well as equivalent owenrship liabilities, so they own shit squat in net terms (excpet maybe their management fees).
I don’t understand why customer owned co-ops aren’t ubiquitous. Vanguard is amazing- low fees, and great services- they beat all of the competition. I had to call their support line today and it was the most professional customer service I’ve ever experienced.
The vanguard thing is a common misconception, I've worked for S&P and we did tracking of ownership.
Think of these huge funds as proxies. It's like someone with little finance trading saying most of the internet is owned by cloudflare or RIPE or ARIN.
Vanguard and other large institutions own a huge chunk of everything because most investors don't buy stocks directly, they buy them through mutual funds, ETFs, etc...
tl;dr: They no longer publish source packages except to paying customers. If the paying customers republish the source, then RedHat closes the account.
I'm surprised none of the upstream developers have sued them for violating the license. There's no way I'd trust an organization that was behaving so unethically with control over my machine's package manager.
Anyway, I've been pretty happy with Devuan (Debian without SystemD). I find it much more stable than Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, etc., and all the userspace stuff I care about works great.
This is wrong. Everything in RHEL is downstream from CentOS Stream - all of the sources are published there. The only differences are a handful of trademarks.
>If the paying customers republish the source, then RedHat closes the account.
Even if you ignore the above and think only about the official sources provided direct from the customer portal, it's still not a violation IMO.
Because that's not a restriction on how you can use the software you've been provided, it's a restriction on which services you can expect Red Hat to continue providing you, i.e. providing new software in the form of updates. The software you have already been provided continues functioning, it's not like the system gets bricked if your account is closed. GPL only specifies "what are you allowed you do with this piece of software you have been provided with", it doesn't guarantee a future relationship between the provider and receiver.
At worst it's a murky area, not a "systematic violation" as you claimed.
Also, like, it's a hypothetical thing the user agreement claims could be done, not something that necessarily is done. I don't think there has ever been an actual demonstrated instance of an account being closed because of that.
They may get published to RHEL first in the case of embargo'd security fixes (and not by long), but the point is that the sources are still published to CentOS Stream.
Or you don't understand the matter being discussed.
The classical definition of open source (cited in this release as Stallman's GPL definition of the preferred way in which to modify code) kind of breaks for ML programs.
This is a good update on the definition of open source from a quite reputable and influential FOSS source.
Your presumption that this article isn't sufficiently pure because in addition to being a company that does Free Software, it needs to do so without doing anything that resembles an ad or in any way ensures profitability is pedantic. If we had it your way the only open source software we would have would be mom's basement projects with shoestring budgets.
That's not open source!
I'm going to call this "Wizard of Ozzing". You give away the spectacle of magic tricks, but none of the science and machinery to do it yourself. You're still hiding it all behind fake virtue signalling.
Open source in AI is open weights, open training scripts, open inference scripts, open training datasets, and associated helper utilities. Without the science lab, you cannot replicate the science.
Weights in a vacuum are not open. It's a trick.