Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to redefine open source so badly

Money? Is it money?

clicks article

For Meta, it's all about the money.

Shocking.

I taught myself programming in the 80s, then worked myself from waitress and line cook to programmer, UXD, and design lead to the point of being in the running for an Apple design award in the 2010s.

But I cared more than anything about making things FOR people. Making like easier. Making people happy. Making software that was a joy to use.

Then I got sick with something that’s neither curable nor easily manageable.

Now I’m destitute and have to choose between medicine and food, and I’m staring down homelessness. (eta I was homeless from age 16-18, and I won’t do that again now, with autoimmune dysautonomia and in my mid-50s, even if the alternative is final.)

Fuck these idiots who bought their way into nerd status (like Musk) or had one hot idea that took off and didn’t have to do anything after (this fucking guy). Hundreds or thousands of designers and programmers made these companies, and were tossed out like trash so a couple of people can be rock stars, making more per hour than most of us will see in a lifetime.

Slay the dragons.
- I mean, didn't he famously steal the idea?
- We're trying! You didn't know Karla when you were there did you? She had the best stories about Spain.
- I'm sorry you had to go through this and are suffering. There are people that can (literally) feel your pain, I hope that can give some comfort.
  
  I'm lucky to be in Europe, otherwise I would (very likely) be dead and broke if not.
For Meta, it's all about the money.

And avoiding regulation
- Well yeah, because following regulations has an impact on the bottom line.
- One is in direct relation with the other
The time it took me to reach this conclusion, after seeing the headline, is measured in quectoseconds.
- That's alotl seconds!

Kinda funny how when mega corps can benefit from the millions upon millions of developer hours that they’re not paying for they’re all for open source. But when the mega corps have to ante up (with massive hardware purchases out of reach of any of said developers) they’re suddenly less excited about sharing their work.

You are describing parasitic behavior
- A cancer does this also.
I've been begging my company to commit to 1% of our revenue toward open source software we use.

It would be life changing for many of these devs.
- I'm begging for far less, like 0.001%.
  
  Very much unsuccessful so far.

I dont give a fuck what you want mark. nobody is. what i want is for you to fuck off.

He is definitely in the same list as Trump and Elon Musk.

Because he's an insecure and greedy child.

He's also a sociopath who will say and do anything to get his way.
- You're right, he's a very complex asshole, indeed!

A friend of mine worked on the team that wrote the EU AI legislation. He is a fucking genius and so are his colleagues. There is little chance he can simply "change the definition of open source". He might be able to challenge the EU definition in court and postpone paying,but be will pay.

The brussels bureaucracy is a absolutely fed up with US tech bro antics by now and both Microsoft and Google have already learned their lesson. Zuckerbergs Meta still tries to resist,but he will fall as well.

Funnily this is absolutely speed up by their antics in the US as this leads to more and more lawmakers here realising that the European societies need to be protected from them the same way it needs to be protected from China.

Fuck off, Fuckerberg.

Meta's Llama models also impose licensing restrictions on its users. For example, if you have an extremely successful AI program that uses Llama code, you'll have to pay Meta to use it. That's not open source. Period.

open source != no license restrictions

According to Meta, "Existing open source definitions for software do not encompass the complexities of today's rapidly advancing AI models. We are committed to keep working with the industry on new definitions to serve everyone safely and responsibly within the AI community."

i think, he's got a point, tho

is ai open source, when the trainig data isn't?
as i understand, right now: yes, it's enough, that the code is open source. and i think that's a big problem

i'm not deep into ai, so correct me if i'm wrong.

Open source software doesn't, by definition, place restrictions on usage.

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor.

Clauses like "you can use this software freely except in specific circumstances" fly against that. Open source licenses usually have very little to say about what the software should be used for, and usually just as an affirmation that you can use the software for whatever you want.
I don't think any of our classical open licenses from the 80s and 90s were ever created with AI in mind. They are inadequate. An update or new one is needed.

Stallman, spit out the toe cheese and get to work.
- The OSI have had a go: https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition
Software licenses that "discriminate against any person or group of persons" or "restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor" are not open source. Llama's license doesn't just restrict Llama from being used by companies with "700 million monthly active users", it also restricts Llama from being used to "create, train, fine tune, or otherwise improve an AI model" or being used for military purposes (although Meta made an exception for the US military). Therefore, Llama is not open source.
- The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources
  
  So as I understand it, under the OSI definition of the word, anything distributed under a copyleft licence would not be open source.
  
  So all software with GNU GPL, for example.
I understand the same way and I think there's a lot of gray area which makes it hard to just say "the data also needs to be open source for the code to be open source". What would that mean for postgreSQL? Does it magically turn closed source if I don't share what's in my db? What would it mean to every open source software that stores and uses that stored data?

I'm not saying the AI models shouldn't be open source, I'm saying reigning in the models needs to be done very carefully because it's very easy to overreach and open up a whole other can of worms.
- PostgreSQL is not built on top of the data you host in your db. It's not a valid comparison.

Money

Aww come on. There's plenty to be mad at Zuckerberg about, but releasing Llama under a semi-permissive license was a massive gift to the world. It gave independent researchers access to a working LLM for the first time. For example, Deepseek got their start messing around with Llama derivatives back in the day (though, to be clear, their MIT-licensed V3 and R1 models are not Llama derivatives).

As for open training data, its a good ideal but I don't think it's a realistic possibility for any organization that wants to build a workable LLM. These things use trillions of documents in training, and no matter how hard you try to clean the data, there's definitely going to be something lawyers can find to sue you over. No organization is going to open themselves up to the liability. And if you gimp your data set, you get a dumb AI that nobody wants to use.

How about a no.

Yes

Looking at any picture of mark suckerberg makes you believe that they are very much ahead with AI and robotics.

Either way, fuck Facebook, stop trying to ruin everything good in the world.

I think the licence type he is looking for is shareware

Because he's a massive douche?

Desperately trying tap in to the general trust/safety feel that open source software typically has. Trying to muddy the waters because they’ve proven they cannot be trusted whatsoever

when the data used to train the AI is copyrighted, how do you make it open source? it's a valid question.

one thing is the model or the code that trains the AI. the other thing is the data that produces the weights which determines how the model predicts

of course, the obligatory fuck meta and the zuck and all that but there is a legal conundrum here we need to address that don't fit into our current IP legal framework

my preferred solution is just to eliminate IP entirely
- I mean, you can have open source weights, training data, and code/model architecture. If you've done all three it's an open model, otherwise you state open "component". Seems pretty straightforward to me.
- when the data used to train the AI is copyrighted, how do you make it open source? it's a valid question.
  
  It is actually possible to reveal the source of training data without showing the data itself. But I think this is a bit deeper since I'll bet all of my teeth that the training data they've used is literally the 20 years of Facebook interactions and entries that they have just chilling on their servers. Literally 3+ billion people's lives are the training data.
- when the data used to train the AI is copyrighted, how do you make it open source?
  
  When part of my code base belongs to someone else, how do I make it open source? By open sourcing the parts that belong to me, while clarifying that it's only partially open source.
- The OSI's definition actually tackles this pretty well:
  
  Sufficient information as to the source of the data so that one could potentially go out and to retrieve it, and recreate the model, is sufficient to fall within the OSAI definition.

I don't get it. What would they redefine it to?

What are we going to do with the colonisers?

water the tree of liberty? 🥰

If people could stop redefining words, that would go a long way to fixing our current strife.

Not a total solution, but it would clarify the discussion. I loathe people who redefine and weaponize words.

I have some Aladeen news for you my friend
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Is it for control, money? Of course it is.

No open source license type where corporations still have to pay?

If you are referring to licenses that prohibit commercial use or prevent certain types of users from using the software, those licenses are not open source because they "discriminate against any person or group of persons" or "restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor".

For example, if a developer offers their software in a source-available "community" version that is restricted to non-commercial use and a proprietary "enterprise" version, neither the community version nor the enterprise version is open source. On the other hand, if a developer uses an open core licensing model by offering an open source "community" version and a proprietary "enterprise" version, the community version is open source while the enterprise version is not.
No, because that would no longer be open in the open source sense.

It's either open for everyone, or it isn't open.

Edit: sorry to whoever doesn't like it, but it's literally how "open source" is defined
- No, software being free as in beer is not a necessary condition for being open-source. And if the code is not free as in beer, the pricing model can be whatever the hell you want, as long as the code is shared when the user is licensed. That can mean an expensive license for enterprise use coexisting with a free license for (say) researchers and individual devs.
- And that’s literally what the article says lol I don’t know why you were downvoted.
  
  Emily Omier, a well-regarded open-source start-up consultant, emphasized that open source is a binary standard set by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), not a spectrum. "Either you're open source, or you are not.