Comment by hoppp
4 days ago
Its using Concrete from Zama.
I didn't like their license because it's BSD-3-Clause-Clear but then they state:
"Zama’s libraries are free to use under the BSD 3-Clause Clear license only for development, research, prototyping, and experimentation purposes. However, for any commercial use of Zama's open source code, companies must purchase Zama’s commercial patent license"
So Its not free, you need to pay for patent license, and they don't disclose how much.
I recommend OpenFHE as an alternative Free open source solution. I know its C++ and not Rust, but no patent license and it can do the same thing the blog post wants to do, it even has more features like proxy-reencryption that I think Concrete can't do.
How is this "BSD-licensed but only for research" not self-contradictory?
It's like saying: "FREE* candy! (Free to look at, eating is $6.95 / pound)"
They use the patent loophole. From https://www.zama.ai/post/open-source
> If a company open sources their code under BSD3-clear, they can sell additional licenses to use the patents included in the open source code. In this case, it still isn’t the software that is sold, but rather the usage rights of the patented intellectual property it contains.
Every day I like the Apache licence more.
BSD+"additional clause" is not BSD.
Just like 3+1 is not 3.
Wouldn't the patent still be a problem with the standard BSD license? BSD would grant you license to redistribute the software but not necessarily the patent rights to use it.
3 replies →
Concrete from Zama is a completely different algorithm to the one used in this product; the former uses the CKKS algorithm, while the latter is the BFV algorithm.
OpenFHE supports all major FHE schemes, including the BGV, BFV, CKKS, DM (FHEW), and CGGI (TFHE) schemes.
Copied from openfhe.org
Or maybe thats not what you meant...
Source? I'm unconvinced. They have been posting stuff about implementing HE primitives in Swift as of last year.
Zama has already hit competitors with (French) patent charges. Apple's HE implementation is in Swift and uses BFV, which is very different HE from anything Zama does and doesn't use their source.
Yeah that was what I thought. I've seen their engineers also push for an employment drive for more engineers in the HE space, so I assume they're going to expand its use where applicable, building from the ground up.