The artificial intelligence company MiniMax recently announced that its latest artificial intelligence model M2.7 is open source. However, the open source model has caused great controversy in the open source community. The reason is that the open source license adopted by MiniMax is not a standard open source license, so it cannot be said to be open source.
Specifically, the license used by M2.7 is a non-commercial license, which clearly stipulates that it cannot be used for commercial purposes. Whether it is the M2.7 model itself or a derivative version, written authorization from MiniMax must be obtained for commercial use.
This means that model aggregation websites such as OpenRouter cannot run M2.7 and provide external services through their own GPU clusters unless the platform has been authorized by MiniMax.
The contents of the M2.7 non-commercial license are as follows:
Non-commercial use is subject to the terms of the MIT License; commercial use requires prior written authorization
If the software or any derivatives are used for commercial purposes, it must be prominently displayed on the website / user interface / blog post / about page / product documentation, etc. as being built with MiniMax M2.7
Any commercial use of this model or any derivatives thereof is prohibited without prior written authorization from MiniMax.
Commercial use refers to the use of the model or any derivatives based on the model for commercial gain or monetary compensation
To put it simply, it can only be played by developers themselves:
There is essentially no big difference between open source and non-open source of the MiniMax M2.7 model this time, because if it is used strictly in accordance with the license specifications, the model can only be played by developers themselves, and major platforms cannot use MiniMax M2.7 to provide external services.
According to the OSI open source license definition, this non-commercial license does not meet the definition of an open source license, so the MiniMax M2.7 model cannot be called open source, which is the reason for the current controversy.
The open source community naturally hopes that MiniMax will continue to open source the model under a standard license. In other words, if you are not willing to open source, then don't open source. You cannot actually practice closed source in the name of open source.
According to the non-commercial license regulations, if developers want to call M2.7, there is a high probability that they can only pay for it through MiniMax's own platform. It is unlikely that a third-party platform will be willing to pay the license fee and provide services (after all, there are many open source models).
Generally speaking, this MiniMax license change is not a good thing for the open source community, but MiniMax should obviously have anticipated these disputes, and continues to use non-commercial licenses despite anticipating the disputes, which means that MiniMax must have its own business plan.
Sources:MiniMax M2.7 LICENSE