Comment by badsectoracula
18 hours ago
> Devstral 2 ships under a modified MIT license, while Devstral Small 2 uses Apache 2.0. Both are open-source and permissively licensed to accelerate distributed intelligence.
Uh, the "Modified MIT license" here[0] for Devstral 2 doesn't look particularly permissively licensed (or open-source):
> 2. You are not authorized to exercise any rights under this license if the global consolidated monthly revenue of your company (or that of your employer) exceeds $20 million (or its equivalent in another currency) for the preceding month. This restriction in (b) applies to the Model and any derivatives, modifications, or combined works based on it, whether provided by Mistral AI or by a third party. You may contact Mistral AI (sales@mistral.ai) to request a commercial license, which Mistral AI may grant you at its sole discretion, or choose to use the Model on Mistral AI's hosted services available at https://mistral.ai/.
[0] https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Devstral-2-123B-Instruct-25...
Personally I really like the normalization of these "Permissively" licensed models that only restrict companies with massive revenues from using them for free.
If you want to use something, and your company makes $240,000,000 in annual revenue, you should probably pay for it.
These are not permissively licensed though, the terms "permissive license" has connotations that pretty much everyone who is into FLOSS understands (same with "open source").
I do not mind having a license like that, my gripe is with using the terms "permissive" and "open source" like that because such use dilutes them. I cannot think of any reason to do that aside from trying to dilute the term (especially when some laws, like the EU AI Act, are less restrictive when it comes to open source AIs specifically).
> I do not mind having a license like that, my gripe is with using the terms "permissive" and "open source" like that because such use dilutes them. I cannot think of any reason to do that aside from trying to dilute the term (especially when some laws, like the EU AI Act, are less restrictive when it comes to open source AIs specifically).
Good. In this case, let it be diluted! These extra "restrictions" don't affect normal people at all, and won't even affect any small/medium businesses. I couldn't care less that the term is "diluted" and that makes it harder for those poor, poor megacorporations. They swim in money already, they can deal with it.
We can discuss the exact threshold, but as long as these "restrictions" are so extreme that they only affect huge megacorporations, this is still "permissive" in my book. I will gladly die on this hill.
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That's fine, but I don't think you should call it open source or call it MIT or even 'modified MIT.' Call it Mistral license or something along those lines
That's probably better, but Modified MIT is pretty descriptive, I read it as "mostly MIT, but with caveats for extreme cases" which is about right, if you already know what the MIT license entails
Whatever name they come up with for a new license will be less useful, because I'll have to figure out that this is what that is
imo this is a hill people need to stop dying on. Open source means "I can see the source" to most of the world. Wishing it meant "very permissively licensed" to everyone is a lost cause.
And honestly it wasn't a good hill to begin with: if what you are talking about is the license, call it "open license". The source code is out in the open, so it is "open source". This is why the purists have lost ground to practical usage.
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You're presently illustrating exactly why Stallman et al were such sticklers about "Free Software."
"Open Source" is nebulous. It reasonably works here, for better or worse.
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Earnestly, what's the concern here? People complain about open source being mostly beneficial to megacorps, if that's the main change (idk I haven't looked too closely) then that's pretty good, no?
They are claiming something is open-source when it isn’t. Regardless of whether you think the deviation from open-source is a good thing or not, you should still be in favour of honesty.
*according to your definition of open-source
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Mainly about the dilution of the term. Though TBH i do not think that open source is beneficial mostly to megacorps either.
Mistral have used janky licenses in that a few times in the past. I was hoping the competition from China might have snapped them out of it.
All "Open Source" licenses are to an extent, janky. Obligatory "Stallman was right;" -- If it's not GPL/Free Software, YMMV.
Is such a term even enforceable? How would it be? How could Mistral know how much a company makes if that information isn't public?
They don't have to enforce it, evil megacorps won't risk the legal consequences of using it without talking to Mistral first. In reality they just won't use it.