Free Software

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What is free software?

Free software is software that respects the 4 software freedoms. The 4 freedoms are

The freedom to run the run the program
The freedom to study the source code
The freedom to modify the source code
The freedom to distribute modified versions of the source code

Please note: Free software does not relate to monetary price. Free software can be sold or gratis (no cost)

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possiblylinux127

LLM licensing discussion (self.freesoftware)

submitted 9 months ago by possiblylinux127 to c/freesoftware

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Recently I have been playing around with ollama and some of the models. With OpenwebUI+ollama you can have a free software self hosted LLM for personal or professional use.

However, when I was browsing some of the models I couldn't help but notice that some of the licenses were contrary to free software. The free software models seem to be mostly licensed under Apache but models like Google Gemmi are under a custom license that restricts what you can do among other things. This seems like the opposite of free software and free software ideas.

What I think needs to happen is that we need to come up with some free LLM licensing for the community. This would also allow companies to publish free models with some certainty about the legality.

The other question is what actually counts as "source code" for a LLM. For copy left licensing the idea is that anyone can edit and distribute the sources but for a language model the source is not really clear.

What do you guys think? Let's get a discussion going as like it or not, LLMs are here to stay.

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