Weights, not a service, with Microsoft as launch partner
Meta and Microsoft announced Llama 2 on July 18, 2023: pretrained and chat fine-tuned model weights and starting code, at 7B, 13B and 70B parameters, downloadable directly or through Azure, AWS and Hugging Face. Microsoft became the preferred cloud partner, adding Llama 2 to Azure's model catalog and optimizing it to run locally on Windows. [1]
Meta described the release as free for research and commercial use, with no licensing fee for either. That framing, repeated in most day-one coverage, is true only for the licensees the agreement actually covers. [1][2]
What the community license actually requires
The Llama 2 Community License grants a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, distribute and build derivative works from the Llama Materials, defined as Meta's proprietary model code, weights, and inference and training-enabling code. A redistributor must pass along a copy of the agreement and keep an attribution notice crediting Meta. [2]
Two clauses go beyond ordinary attribution. First, a licensee may not use the Llama Materials, or any output of them, to improve any large language model other than Llama 2 or a derivative of it. Second, a licensee whose products or services had more than 700 million monthly active users in the month before the relevant Llama 2 version's release date needs a separate license from Meta, granted at Meta's sole discretion, before exercising any right under the agreement at all. In practice that threshold names a short list of companies without naming them, since Meta was the licensor deciding who counted as a competitor worth gating. [2]
Why 'open source' didn't hold up
Two days after the release, the Open Source Initiative argued the license does not meet the Open Source Definition it maintains. Its objection wasn't about withheld source code; the complaint was that the license discriminates against fields of endeavor and against specific licensees, which the definition's points five and six rule out. The acceptable-use policy bars named categories of use, and the 700-million-user clause singles out a class of company by size rather than by conduct. [3]
Atlas interpretation: That makes the event's category label a description of Meta's marketing rather than a settled classification. The weights were genuinely downloadable and usable by nearly everyone at no cost, which is what most coverage meant by 'open.' But a license that requires the largest possible competitors to ask permission, and forbids using the model's own outputs to train a rival, is doing something a permissive open-source license does not do: naming who the terms are for. [2][3]
Sources
- Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama
Meta AI · Jul 18, 2023
- LLAMA 2 COMMUNITY LICENSE AGREEMENT
Meta · Jul 18, 2023
- Meta's LLaMa license is not Open Source
Open Source Initiative · Jul 20, 2023