This is why I've always considered the weights-vs-source debate to be an enormous red herring that skips the far more important question: are the weights actually "Open" in the first place?

If Llama released everything that the most zealous opponents of weights=source demand they release under the same license that they're currently offering the weights under, we'd still be left with something that falls cleanly into the category of Source Available. It's a generous Source Available, but removes many of the freedoms that are part of both the Open Source and Free Software Definitions.

Fighting over weights vs source implicitly cedes the far more important ground in the battle over the soul of FOSS, and that will have ripple effects across the industry in ways that ceding weights=source never would.

It gets even weirder with Llama 4: https://www.llama.com/llama4/use-policy/ [Update: Apparently this has been the case since 3.2!]

> With respect to any multimodal models included in Llama 4, the rights granted under Section 1(a) of the Llama 4 Community License Agreement are not being granted to you if you are an individual domiciled in, or a company with a principal place of business in, the European Union. This restriction does not apply to end users of a product or service that incorporates any such multimodal models.

This is especially strange considering that Llama 3.2 also was multimodal, yet to my knowledge there was no such restriction.

In any case, at least Huggingface seems to be collecting these details now – see for example https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Inst...

Curious to see what Ollama will do.

AFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights, for various reasons including the lack of human authorship. Which would mean that if you didn’t separately and explicitly agree to the license by clicking through something, there is no basis for the “by using this model” agreement.

Of course you probably don’t have enough money to get a ruling on this question, just wanted to point out that (afaik) it is up for debate. Maybe you should just avoid clicking on license agreement buttons, if you can.

A lot of posts here saying this is irrelevant or whatever - unix was mostly developed out in the open and got into all sorts of trouble when big companies started cracking down on copyright ownership. This blog post isn't entreating you to necessarily behave differently w/r/t your Llama usage, just to be aware the license is restrictive, doesn't really line up with Meta calling it "open source", and eventually this could create consequences down the road. The post doesn't even mention it but there are safer models to use right now (deepseek) that have permissive licensing.

@dang the title rename seems worse: "you're probably ..." is rather meaningfully different than "breaking the ..." as the latter sounds like it's instructions on how to "break the ..."