Ollama violating llama.cpp license for over a year

The same MIT license is in the ollama project as is in the llama.cpp project, is this not sufficient?

llamma.cpp https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/LICENSE

ollama.cpp https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/LICENSE

The clause at issue is this one:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The copyright notice is the bit at the top that identifies who owns the copyright to the code. You can use MIT code alongside any license you'd like as long as you attribute the MIT portions properly.

That said, this is a requirement that almost no one follows in non-source distributions and almost no one makes a stink about, so I suspect that the main reason why this is being brought up specifically is because a lot of people have beef with Ollama for not even giving any kind of public credit to llama.cpp for being the beating heart of their system.

Had they been less weird about giving credit in the normal, just-being-polite way I don't think anyone would have noticed that technically the license requires them to give a particular kind of attribution.

It is the same license but the copyright notice is different, so no, not sufficient.

Fair enough response to my post but they have the llama license too https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/L...

Fair enough response to my post but they have the llama license too https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/L...

They need to supply license text and copyright notice with the binary distribution, as well.

Many, many projects on GitHub don’t do it and are not license compliant.

The GH issue's point [0] is that this isn't in the binary distributions, but it has to be "included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" (from the MIT license), which applies to binary distributions as well.

[0]: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185

That is actually unspecified in the license, undecided in court, and as you note very infrequently applied. I can see an argument that the license ought to be read that way, but the fact is that it very rarely is. The only reason why Ollama is being singled out here is because people have long-standing beef with them not doing the regular polite attribution that actually is normal in the community.

No, this completely misses the point of what the issue is about. You're missing the copyright holder information, the rest of the license is almost secondary to that fact.

Funny how all those large companies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year getting those attributions right. All those open source license information pages like https://sieportal.siemens.com/oss/oss.html are just for fun, right?

The Playstation 3/4 and the switch also have such license information available via a menu that isn't buried, too. This cellphone has settings -> about - > legal - > open source licenses - the top option. That opens a window that is hundreds of pages long of links to licenses for every library used.

Right, sorry. Didn’t notice.

The license says:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Is your argument that a binary is not a copy or substantial portion of the Software?

If you distribute a binary, I think it's pretty obvious that either the binary itself should include the notice and the license, or the archive with the binary should include it. Ex: most packaging systems include the licenses in the docs directory that nobody looks at, which is probably sufficient.