Comment by satvikpendem
7 months ago
This is not open source, they have a "modified MIT license" where they have other restrictions on users over a certain threshold.
Our only modification part is that, if the Software (or any derivative works
thereof) is used for any of your commercial products or services that have
more than 100 million monthly active users, or more than 20 million US dollars
(or equivalent in other currencies) in monthly revenue, you shall prominently
display "Kimi K2" on the user interface of such product or service.
> This is not open source
OSI purism is deleterious and has led to industry capture.
Non-viral open source is simply a license for hyperscalers to take advantage. To co-opt offerings and make hundreds of millions without giving anything back.
We need more "fair source" licensing to support sustainable engineering that rewards the small ICs rather than mega conglomerate corporations with multi-trillion dollar market caps. The same companies that are destroying the open web.
This license isn't even that protective of the authors. It just asks for credit if you pass a MAU/ARR threshold. They should honestly ask for money if you hit those thresholds and should blacklist the Mag7 from usage altogether.
The resources put into building this are significant and they're giving it to you for free. We should applaud it.
> small ICs
The majority of open source code is contributed by companies, typically very large corporations. The thought of the open source ecosystem being largely carried by lone hobbyist contributors in their spare time after work is a myth. There are such folks (heck I'm one of them) and they are appreciated and important, but their perception far exceeds their real role in the open source ecosystem.
I've heard people go back and fortg on this before but you seem pretty certain about it, can you share some stats so I can see also?
Yep, awesome stuff. Call it "fair source" if you want to. Don't call it open source. I'm an absolutist about very few things, but the definition of open source is one of them. Every bit of variation given in the definition is a win for those who have ulterior motives for polluting the definition. Open source isn't a vague concept, it's a defined term with a legally accepted meaning. Very much like "fair use". It's dangerous to allow this definition to be altered. OpenAI (A deliberate misnomer if ever there was one) and friends would really love to co-opt the term.
That's great, nothing wrong with giving away something for free, just don't call it open source.
That seems like a combination of Llama's "prominently display “Built with Llama”" and "greater than 700 million monthly active users" terms but put into one and masquerading as "slightly changed MIT".
The difference is it doesn't include Llama's usage restrictions that disqualify it from being an Open Source license.
I feel like those restrictions don't violate the OSD (or the FSF's Free Software Definition, or Debian's); there are similar restrictions in the GPLv2, the GPLv3, the 4-clause BSD license, and so on. They just don't have user or revenue thresholds. The GPLv2, for example, says:
> c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)
And the 4-clause BSD license says:
> 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the organization.
Both of these licenses are not just non-controversially open-source licenses; they're such central open-source licenses that IIRC much of the debate on the adoption of the OSD was centered on ensuring that they, or the more difficult Artistic license, were not excluded.
It's sort of nonsense to talk about neural networks being "open source" or "not open source", because there isn't source code that they could be built from. The nearest equivalent would be the training materials and training procedure, which isn't provided, but running that is not very similar to recompilation: it costs millions of dollars and doesn't produce the same results every time.
But that's not a question about the license.
It may not violate the OSD, but I would still argue that this license is a Bad Idea. Not because what they're trying to do is inherently bad in any way, but simply because it's yet another new, unknown, not-fully-understood license to deal with. The fact that we're having this conversation illustrating that very fact.
My personal feeling is that almost every project (I'll hedge a little because life is complicated) should prefer an OSI certified license and NOT make up their own license (even if that new license is "just" a modification of an existing license). License proliferation[1] is generally considered a Bad Thing for good reason.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation
Aren't most licenses "not fully understood" in any reasonable legal sense? To my knowledge only the Artistic License and the GPL have seen the inside of a court room. And yet to this day nobody really knows how the GPL works with languages that don't follow C's model of a compile and a link step. And the boundaries of what's a derivative work in the GPL are still mostly set by convention, not a legal framework.
What makes us comfortable with the "traditional open source licenses" is that people have been using them for decades and nothing bad has happened. But that's mostly because breaking an open source license is rarely litigated against, not because we have some special knowledge of what those licenses mean and how to abide by that
1 reply →
I'm of the personal opinion that it's quite reasonable for the creators to want attribution in case you manage to build a "successful product" off their work. The fact that it's a new or different license is a much smaller thing.
A lot of open source, copyleft things already have attribution clauses. You're allowed commerical use of someone else's work already, regardless of scale. Attribution is a very benign ask.
3 replies →
The OSD does not allow for discrimination:
"The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons."
"The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."
By having a clause that discriminates based on revenue, it cannot be Open Source.
If they had required everyone to provide attribution in the same manner, then we would have to examine the specifics of the attribution requirement to determine if it is compatible... but since they discriminate, it violates the open source definition, and no further analysis is necessary.
This license with the custom clause seems equivalent to dual-licensing the product under the following licenses combined:
* Small companies may use it without attribution
* Anyone may use it with attribution
The first may not be OSI compatible, but if the second license is then it’s fair to call the offering open weights, in the same way that dual-licensing software under GPL and a commercial license is a type of open source.
Presumably the restriction on discrimination relates to license terms which grant _no_ valid open source license to some group of people.
1 reply →
That's basically less restrictive than OpenStreetMap.
What part of this goes against the four fundamental freedoms? Can you point at it?
Exactly, I wouldn’t mind adding that text on our service if we made 20m $, the parent made it sound like a huge clause
Yeah, its fair for them if they want a little bit credit
nothing gucci there
"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."
Being required to display branding in that way contradicts "run the program as you wish".
You are still free to run the program as you wish, you just have to provide attribution to the end user. It's essentially CC BY but even more permissive, because the attribution only kicks in once when specific, relatively uncommon conditions are met.
I think basically everybody considers CC BY to be open source, so a strictly more permissive license should be too, I think.
Being required to store the GPL license notice on my hard drive is contradicting my wishes. And I'm not even earning $20 million US dollars per month off GPL software!
This freedom might be against the freedom of others to get your modifications.
It's silly, but in the LLM world - "open source" is usually used to mean "weights are published". This is not to be confused with the software licensing meaning of "open source".
The more tasteful corners of the LLM world use "open weights" instead of "open source" for licenses that aren't OSI.
This is just so Google doesn't build a woke version of it and calls it gemini-3.0-pro