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Can open source be too open? - by Philip Clark

philipjclark.substack.com · 2,231 words · saved by 1 readers

Few topics in 2023 are more schismatic than open source LLMs. To some, they represent a noble crusade against closed source model providers. To others, they are the ill-guided equivalent of trying to publish nuclear weapon design specs on the internet. Either way, companies building open source models and LLM infrastructure such as Mistral and Together are amassing capital and talent. What is intriguing is that, in parallel, many of the open source darlings of the last decade are reassessing their openness. Redhat and Hashicorp opted to restrict their open source licenses this summer. Mongo, Elastic, Cockroach, Sentry, and MariaDB did the same a few years ago. Docker sunset its open source offering almost entirely. The Confluent and Databricks hosted clouds resemble open source Kafka and Spark less and less. Even in AI, the share of models with permissible open source licenses on Hugging Face is plummeting by some measures. What’s going on? Have open source cloud infrastructure compani

Can open source be too open? Lessons from a decade of cloud infrastructure projects Philip Clark Sep 17, 2023 3 1 Share Few topics in 2023 are more schismatic than open source LLMs. To some, they represent a noble crusade against closed source model providers. To others, they are the ill-guided equivalent of trying to publish nuclear weapon design specs on the internet. Either way, companies building open source models and LLM infrastructure such as Mistral and Together are amassing capital and talent. What is intriguing is that, in parallel, many of the open source darlings of the last decade

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