“The current landscape of AI model licensing is riddled with confusion, restrictive terms, and misleading claims of openness,” Vidal said. “Instead of redefining ‘open’ to suit corporate interests, the AI industry should align with established open source principles to create a truly open ecosystem.”
In traditional software, the perennial struggle between open source and proprietary revolves around the “true” meaning of “open source.” This can be resolved by deferring to the formal “definition” as per the Open Source Initiative, the industry stewards of what are and aren’t legitimate open source licenses. More recently, the OSI has formed a definition of “open source AI”
“The point of having definitions is to have criteria that can be scored, and focusing on licensing is how that is accomplished,” Maffulli said in a statement issued to TechCrunch. “The global community and industry have come to rely on the Open Source Definition and now the Open Source AI Definition as objective measures that they can rely on.”
Technically, R1 is “open” in that the model is permissively licensed, which means it can be deployed largely without restrictions. However, R1 isn’t “open source” by the widely accepted definition because some of the tools used to build it are shrouded in mystery. Like many high-flying AI companies, DeepSeek is loathe to reveal its secret sauce.
There are two broad kinds of licenses that meet the formal open source definition as laid out by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
While there’s no shortage of “open” language models to choose from (see: Meta’s Llama), OLMo 2 meets the Open Source Initiative’s definition of open source AI, meaning the tools and data used to develop it are publicly available. The Open Source Initiative, the long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, finalized its open source AI definition in October. But the first OLMo models, released in February, met the criterion as well.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI), a long-running institution aiming to define and “steward” all things open source, today released version 1.0 of its Open Source AI Definition (OSAID). The product of several years of collaboration with academia and industry, the OSAID is intended to offer a standard by which anyone can determine whether AI is open source — or not.
For the past four years, Elastic has given customers a choice between its proprietary Elastic license or the SSPL (server side public license), which was created by MongoDB and subsequently failed to get approved as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the stewards of the official open source definition.
As per the current draft, an Open Source AI system should grant freedoms to use the system for any purpose without seeking permission; to allow others to study how the system works and inspect its components; and to modify and share the system for any purpose.
Open source implies that developers can use the models how they choose, unfettered. But in the case of Llama 3 — as with Llama 2 — Meta has imposed certain licensing restrictions.
When is Open Source not Open Source? Executive Director Maffulli comments on Harness.io’s latest product release
