You're Probably Breaking the Llama Community License

Summary

If you're distributing or redistributing a LLM model that is under the "Llama 3.3 Community License Agreement", you might be breaking at least one of the terms you've explicitly/implicitly agreed to.All of the Llama models and their derivatives (fine-tunes etc) of them is are covered by a Llama Community License. Disclaimer I (the author) am not a lawyer, and might not even be in the same country as you, while all of this is very depending on the jurisdiction. This post also doesn't try to outline what will happen if you break the agreement, but what claims Meta make. They might not be able to make these claims against you at all. It also doesn't apply if you already have your own agreement with Meta/Llama that superseedes the public license, nor if you're just a user of any of the llama models. The feeling I get from the ML/AI community right now, is that almost no one actually reads and follows the various license agreements they agree to follow, when they use models like Meta's Llama. Llama is marketed as a "open source" model yet Meta themselves also calls it "proprietary" in the license text and have a lot of conditions that aren't compatible with open source. If you trusted the marketing to be true and have an existing understanding of "open source", it's possible you've been making assumptions about the license which aren't true in reality. I'll try to go through some of the points from the license that I think are the most likely to have been missed, in an effort to hopefully spread at least some new information that I haven't seen become common knowledge in the community, since many still refer to the Llama family of models as "open source". The full license can be found here: https://www.llama.com/llama3_3/license (At the time of writing, revision Llama 3.3 Version Release Date: December 6, 2024, read via browser on March 27, 2025). If you're curious about how the the Llama Community License and its Use Policy has changed between versions, I've published a...