The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has officially released version 1.0 of its Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) on Oct. 28 at the 2024 All Things Open conference this week. It’s been a long slow journey to this significant milestone in the effort to establish a clear standard for open source artificial intelligence (AI).
The Open Source Initiative’s Release Candidate 1 identifies four categories of data and demands sharing of data, source code and model parameters.
The Open Source Initiative has been working on defining open source AI for the past two years, and they should release their definition in November,” Columbro said. “OSI’s approach will focus on the principles, providing a binary definition of open source AI — either it is or it isn’t.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) released a near-final definition of open source AI that will free up the broad community of AI developers to create a flourishing movement for AI innovation, much like with the creation of the internet itself.
Stefano Maffulli, the OSI’s executive director, wrote, “We are delighted to welcome Elastic back into the open source ecosystem.”
AI uses both code and data, and this combination continues to be a challenge for open source, said experts at the United Nations OSPOs for Good Conference.
The cries to “ban open source” first surfaced last autumn—partly a response to Meta and others’ “opening” large language models (LLMs). Lobbyists bandied the phrase around political rallies and across policy circles. Yet many critics could not explain what open source means in any context and were unfamiliar with the Open Source Definition (OSD). Not knowing or understanding the technical details did not appear to be a barrier to sharing a negative opinion.
After two years of work, OSI has a draft definition, Stefano Maffulli, executive director of OSI, told The New Stack. The team is going through a “validation phase,” he said, making sure the definition includes everything that falls into the open source category, or is likely to.
The OSI is planning a series of workshops to help it refine its working definition of open source AI, with support from Amazon, Cisco, Google and the Sloan Foundation.
The Open Source Initiative is leading an open, community-driven process to detail how the open source definition applies in the context of an AI world. But even without that process, we already know that Meta’s custom license, by restricting usage and the ability to create derivative works, violates multiple tenets of both the current definition of open source and any final work of the OSI community that’s specific to AI.
DOSP involves initially releasing software under a proprietary license, followed by a planned transition to an open source license.
