Publication: TechCrunch

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