On Wed, Mar 29, 2023 at 1:50 PM Jan Ainali jan@aina.li wrote:
I think it is important to, as early as possible, deter all these attempts to weaken the concept of "open" and that we as a movement need to take a hard stance against them. These proprietary licenses do not fit the spirit of sharing all knowledge and letting anyone do whatever they want with it.
Is the BLOOM RAIL license [ https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigscience/license ] proprietary? My understanding is that is not proprietary, and the only reason it doesn't qualify for Open Source Initiative approval is because of these use restrictions:
"You agree not to use the Model or Derivatives of the Model: (a) In any way that violates any applicable national, federal, state, local or international law or regulation; (b) For the purpose of exploiting, harming or attempting to exploit or harm minors in any way; (c) To generate or disseminate verifiably false information with the purpose of harming others; (d) To generate or disseminate personal identifiable information that can be used to harm an individual; (e) To generate or disseminate information or content, in any context (e.g. posts, articles, tweets, chatbots or other kinds of automated bots) without expressly and intelligibly disclaiming that the text is machine generated; (f) To defame, disparage or otherwise harass others; (g) To impersonate or attempt to impersonate others; (h) For fully automated decision making that adversely impacts an individual’s legal rights or otherwise creates or modifies a binding, enforceable obligation; (i) For any use intended to or which has the effect of discriminating against or harming individuals or groups based on online or offline social behavior or known or predicted personal or personality characteristics (j) To exploit any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons based on their age, social, physical or mental characteristics, in order to materially distort the behavior of a person pertaining to that group in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm; (k) For any use intended to or which has the effect of discriminating against individuals or groups based on legally protected characteristics or categories; (l) To provide medical advice and medical results interpretation; (m) To generate or disseminate information for the purpose to be used for administration of justice, law enforcement, immigration or asylum processes, such as predicting an individual will commit fraud/crime commitment (e.g. by text profiling, drawing causal relationships between assertions made in documents, indiscriminate and arbitrarily-targeted use)."
Those restrictions seem very reasonable to me, and I would consider them an advantage given the problems the field is experiencing, including the threats to project content integrity. I don't see any drawbacks, and I see several advantages to encouraging such restrictions.
So I expect the BLOOM license would therefor qualify for an exception as described in https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Cloud_Services_Terms_of_use
There is further discussion of these issues at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.03116.pdf
-LW