Comment by markasoftware

15 hours ago

Moonshot is printing money on k3. It likely costs the same to serve as qwen3.8. The license requires all major inference providers to sign an extra (secret) licensing agreement with moonshot that almost certainly requires them to agree to this price and pay royalties to moonshot. Watch as the k3 price plummets over the next 1-2 weeks.

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markasoftware

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stanac  14 hours ago

If k3 is open-weight (and it's available on hugging face [1]), how could they force providers to sing an extra (secret) licensing agreement?

Edit to answer my own question:

License file [2] states:

> If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, and the aggregate revenue of the Licensee and its affiliates exceeds 20 million US dollars (or the equivalent in other currencies) in total over any consecutive 12 months, the Licensee must enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works for any commercial purpose.

[1] https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3

[2] https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE

  • breakingcups  13 hours ago

    Can weights be copyrightable?

    • 0xbadcafebee  8 hours ago

      Licenses are not copyright law, they are contract law. Copyright is automatic and does not require any terms, as long as the work is covered by copyright. Contract law can then override the innate copyright rights (for example to permit people to use your copyrighted works).

      If you create something that isn't copyright-able, you can still create a contract which people must agree to in order to use your work. The enforcement/validity of that contract then depends on making sure the user knew about the contract and agreed to it. The way they did that here (just publishing a LICENSE file) could be interpreted as a judge as no confirmation of agreement of contract - depending on if they find a "reasonable" user would have known to look for the file.

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