HuggingFace Text Generation License No Longer Open-Source

Don&#x27;t see any ill-will here. They changed license fairly early without soliciting years of contributions from others (like, only a few months old and probably a handful of contributions from public from what I can skim). They don&#x27;t call it open-source any more and the new license doesn&#x27;t contain any words of &quot;open&quot; or &quot;free&quot; or &quot;source&quot; in the name (&quot;Hugging Face Optimized Inference License&quot;).<p>People make mistakes when choosing a license and should be OK if they course-correct fairly quickly.

I am more inclined to agree with the FSF in that open source should not unduly limit how I use a tool. If I can no longer embed it in a product I sell, it is source available, but not open source.<p>Regardless, if the library is worth anything (I am not familiar), I would suspect the pre 1.0 version to be forked and sucked up by AWS&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;etc similar to ElasticSearch.

It&#x27;s sad that most organizations see open source as cheaper COGS rather than a way to solve their own problems more efficiently and improve critical infrastructure they rely on.<p>And so the only options are for HuggingFace to eat the cost of R&amp;D, possibly to improve a direct competitor, or to limit commercial use in this way.

It’s still open source. The only new limitation is that you can’t monetize the model itself, which is fine. They have to make money.<p>You can still:<p>+ use it for personal use<p>+ use it as part of a commercial project<p>+ sell a hosted service of &lt;v1.0<p>You cannot:<p>+ wrap an API around the library (v1.0+) and sell that, without a license from HF.<p>This is less restrictive in practice than some of the extreme Open Source copyleft licenses. It’s fine.