Open Compliance Summit 2024

In the past year, many high-quality AI models have been "open sourced," but under various licenses. Google and Meta, for example, have adopted self-created licenses, while Stable Diffusion moved from the standardized OpenRail-M to a self-created license. In contrast, xAI chose the traditional Apache 2.0 license to "open source" Grok. Open source organizations like the Linux Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and the Chinese OpenAtom Foundation are working on drafting frameworks, definitions, and standardized licenses to address the rising selection costs caused by non-standard licenses. The complexity and lack of standardization in AI model licenses arise because AI models, as structured data, present more confusing intellectual property issues compared to traditional software, which benefits from the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT). This session will explore the intellectual property challenges surrounding AI models, leveraging the experience of drafting the OpenAtom Model License. We aim to clarify what rights are actually licensed and outline what a robust license should cover, offering recommendations for future license drafting and standard-setting.

the incompatibility of open source licences has been one of the banes of our ecosystem (see for example the openvpn apache GPL licence amendment for mbedtls). All of these incompatibilities serve merely to promote confusion among open source developers about how the may legitimately share code among truly open projects, cause massive headaches for users and distributors trying to ensure licence compliance and do nothing to deter people out to violate the licence. The biggest problematic incompatibility is that of GPL with popular permissive licences like Apache-2. This comes about because of the licence steward (the FSF) and its rigid interpretation of the no additional restrictions clause. This talk will argue that this clause isn't as rigid as the FSF thinks and, in fact, restrictions compatible with the purpose of the licence (including the indemnity clause of Apache-2) can be accommodated.