This week, Apple released an SLM (small language model) called OpenELM, which was touted as open source. It did so under a license that got very close to meeting the Open Source Definition–with the caveat that no such official definition exists yet for AI models.
The license says,
Apple grants you a personal, non-exclusive license, under Apple’s copyrights in this original Apple software (the “Apple Software”), to use, reproduce, modify and redistribute the Apple Software, with or without modifications, in source and/or binary forms…
Except as expressly stated in this notice, no other rights or licenses, express or implied, are granted by Apple herein, including but not limited to any patent rights that may be infringed by your derivative works or by other works in which the Apple Software may be incorporated.
So close, and yet, no cigar. The reservation of patent rights in “derivative works” and the grant under “copyrights” apparently seeks to reserve Apple’s ability to sue for patent infringement for use of the model–or perhaps only for changes to the model. But in any case, it doesn’t grant the full rights necessary to be open source.
This is an unfortunate near-miss. It’s not clear that there actually could be any patent rights embodied in or necessary to use the model itself, given the current state of the law in the US, which does not allow patenting of inventions created automatically without human authorship (which probably includes any machine learning model). Also, it seems unlikely that Apple actually intends to sue anyone for patent infringement for using this model, or for modifying it (at least to the extent any inventions were already embodied in the model). So this is probably a case of cautious drafting for an issue that does not really exist.
But at least it’s not RAIL.
