aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
aster.cloud aster.cloud
  • /
  • Platforms
    • Public Cloud
    • On-Premise
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Data
  • Architecture
    • Design
    • Solutions
    • Enterprise
  • Engineering
    • Automation
    • Software Engineering
    • Project Management
    • DevOps
  • Programming
    • Learning
  • Tools
  • About
  • Computing
  • Software
  • Technology

The Open Source Licensing War Is Over

  • aster.cloud
  • August 4, 2023
  • 4 minute read

It’s time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software’s access and ease of use than the purity of its license.

The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can’t be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others).


Partner with aster.cloud
for your next big idea.
Let us know here.



From our partners:

CITI.IO :: Business. Institutions. Society. Global Political Economy.
CYBERPOGO.COM :: For the Arts, Sciences, and Technology.
DADAHACKS.COM :: Parenting For The Rest Of Us.
ZEDISTA.COM :: Entertainment. Sports. Culture. Escape.
TAKUMAKU.COM :: For The Hearth And Home.
ASTER.CLOUD :: From The Cloud And Beyond.
LIWAIWAI.COM :: Intelligence, Inside and Outside.
GLOBALCLOUDPLATFORMS.COM :: For The World's Computing Needs.
FIREGULAMAN.COM :: For The Fire In The Belly Of The Coder.
ASTERCASTER.COM :: Supra Astra. Beyond The Stars.
BARTDAY.COM :: Prosperity For Everyone.

This means, of course, it’s not “open source” according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, “They drew first blood!” and “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off!”, insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 “open source.” They’re right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don’t seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick “open enough.” It’s not that open source doesn’t matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed.

A brief history of open source time

More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, “Younger [developers] today are about POSS—post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub.” In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in “epic clusterf—s” or that “promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases.”

Read More  How To Migrate A Group Of Individual Instances To A Stateful MIG Using Python Script

And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven’t entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or “open enough,” software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep.

In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won’t matter. They won’t matter because “open source” doesn’t really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we’re in the midst of the post–open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.

You don’t have to like this, but the data to support this position is rife through GitHub repositories or the open source licensing trends that have been underway for 20 years. Everything has trended toward permissive, as-open-as-possible access to code, to the point that the underlying license is a lot less important than the ease with which we are able to access and use software.

Source available? Whatevs

Too many open source warriors think that the license is the end, rather than just a means to grant largely unfettered access to the code. They continue to fret about licensing when developers mostly care about use, just as they always have. Keep in mind that more than anything else, open source expands access to quality software without involving the purchasing or (usually) legal teams. This is very similar to what cloud did for hardware. The point was never the license. It was always about access.

Read More  10 Must-Attend Sessions For Data Professionals At Google Cloud Next ‘23

Back when I worked at AWS, we surveyed developers to ask what they most valued in open source leadership. You might think that contributing code to well-known open source projects would rank first, but it didn’t. Not even second or third. Instead, the No. 1 criterion developers used to judge a cloud provider’s open source leadership was that it “makes it easy to deploy my preferred open source software in the cloud.”

I’m not suggesting that contributions don’t matter, but they don’t matter for the reasons you might think. One of the things we did well at AWS was to work with product teams to help them discover their self-interest in contributing to the projects upon which they were building cloud services, such as Elasticache. We were not focused on earning kudos from “the community” (the most overused and underdefined word in all of open source), but rather on putting the product teams in a better position to support customers. Guess what? It worked. Although not perfect, a swelling population of AWS product teams is contributing in significant ways to open source projects.

For the developers who use those services, though, “open source” is a secondary concern to “It helps me be more productive, faster.” Which, again, is not to say that open source doesn’t matter in our cloudified software world, as I’ve noted. Open source is an efficient way to rally around standards, giving developers (and enterprises) easier access to common skills and common infrastructure.

But it’s not the end, and the open source Rambos among us need to realize this. The goal of open source, of cloud, of open APIs, of great documentation, etc., is to enable developers to build with less friction and more opportunity. Is Llama 2 open enough for 99.999% of the developer population to use it with unfettered access? Yes. Is it “open source”? The question doesn’t really matter.

Read More  You’ll Be Breaking Up With Bad Customers — And 9 Other Predictions For 2022 and Beyond

By: Matt Asay
Originally published at InfoWorld

Source: cyberpogo.com


For enquiries, product placements, sponsorships, and collaborations, connect with us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!

Our humans need coffee too! Your support is highly appreciated, thank you!

aster.cloud

Related Topics
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Generative AI
  • History
  • License
  • Meta
  • Open Source
  • Software License
You May Also Like
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

Reliance on US tech providers is making IT leaders skittish

  • May 28, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

Examine the 4 types of edge computing, with examples

  • May 28, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

AI and private cloud: 2 lessons from Dell Tech World 2025

  • May 28, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

TD Synnex named as UK distributor for Cohesity

  • May 28, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

Broadcom’s ‘harsh’ VMware contracts are costing customers up to 1,500% more

  • May 28, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

Weigh these 6 enterprise advantages of storage as a service

  • May 28, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

Pulsant targets partner diversity with new IaaS solution

  • May 23, 2025
View Post
  • Computing
  • Multi-Cloud
  • Technology

Growing AI workloads are causing hybrid cloud headaches

  • May 23, 2025

Stay Connected!
LATEST
  • 1
    Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story
    • May 29, 2025
  • 2
    Reliance on US tech providers is making IT leaders skittish
    • May 28, 2025
  • Examine the 4 types of edge computing, with examples
    • May 28, 2025
  • AI and private cloud: 2 lessons from Dell Tech World 2025
    • May 28, 2025
  • 5
    TD Synnex named as UK distributor for Cohesity
    • May 28, 2025
  • Weigh these 6 enterprise advantages of storage as a service
    • May 28, 2025
  • 7
    Broadcom’s ‘harsh’ VMware contracts are costing customers up to 1,500% more
    • May 28, 2025
  • 8
    Pulsant targets partner diversity with new IaaS solution
    • May 23, 2025
  • 9
    Growing AI workloads are causing hybrid cloud headaches
    • May 23, 2025
  • Gemma 3n 10
    Announcing Gemma 3n preview: powerful, efficient, mobile-first AI
    • May 22, 2025
about
Hello World!

We are aster.cloud. We’re created by programmers for programmers.

Our site aims to provide guides, programming tips, reviews, and interesting materials for tech people and those who want to learn in general.

We would like to hear from you.

If you have any feedback, enquiries, or sponsorship request, kindly reach out to us at:

[email protected]
Most Popular
  • Understand how Windows Server 2025 PAYG licensing works
    • May 20, 2025
  • By the numbers: How upskilling fills the IT skills gap
    • May 21, 2025
  • 3
    Cloud adoption isn’t all it’s cut out to be as enterprises report growing dissatisfaction
    • May 15, 2025
  • 4
    Hybrid cloud is complicated – Red Hat’s new AI assistant wants to solve that
    • May 20, 2025
  • 5
    Google is getting serious on cloud sovereignty
    • May 22, 2025
  • /
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • About
  • Contact Us

Input your search keywords and press Enter.