This pertains to the larger open source licensing discussions that have been happening (as I'm sure you've seen too).
We've released projects under the MIT license before, most notably https://github.com/feyninc/chonkie. While we're not trying to directly monetize on this work, credit goes a long way and helps in other operations.
Recently, attributed usage is shrinking. To be clear, this is not a shrinkage in actual use of our software, just how many people acknowledge that they rely on it.
cc-by-nc is a protection against that. We've been very honest about our work being on top of BiRefNet as we want to extend the original creators the same courtesy. I have no issues if individuals fork/finetune/or otherwise build on top of any open source projects we release, irrespective of license. At minimum, we want acknowledgment if a company chooses to use our software in production.
I don’t think so. There are CC licenses that allow for commercial usage. Most companies ban their developers from using anything with an NC or GPL style licence (with an exception for the Linux kernel).
Also, you might want to speak to an IP lawyer about the legality of re-licensing a derivative of an MIT licensed work, without attribution.
Hi, thanks a lot for bringing this to our radar, and i have updated the model card to reflect this change, and i will update the library shortly to enforce this choice of license.
I have provided additional information in the same thread above, and will reach out to the original author shortly with an apology and I will see how it goes.
I would also like to apologise to the community and i will do better in the future.
- Hafedh Hichri (Lain)
I did reach out to Peng (the original author) before the release about license, citation, paper_url with specific emphasis on the the license part and got the green light from him to release the model under the original MIT license or the apache2.0 license since i have pushed for it.
since this is a mistake from my part not iterating with the team about my comms i sincerely apologize for this and I have updated the model card to reflect this change to use the original MIT license, i will also update the library so that all models using the birefnet architecture will be released under the MIT license shortly.
and thanks a lot for bringing this to my radar.
Yep, nobody wants to adopt models with this license because it opens legal questions most users, whether professional or non-professional, don't want to muddy their work with.
We've released projects under the MIT license before, most notably https://github.com/feyninc/chonkie. While we're not trying to directly monetize on this work, credit goes a long way and helps in other operations.
Recently, attributed usage is shrinking. To be clear, this is not a shrinkage in actual use of our software, just how many people acknowledge that they rely on it.
cc-by-nc is a protection against that. We've been very honest about our work being on top of BiRefNet as we want to extend the original creators the same courtesy. I have no issues if individuals fork/finetune/or otherwise build on top of any open source projects we release, irrespective of license. At minimum, we want acknowledgment if a company chooses to use our software in production.