The Open Source AI Definition – 1.0 – Open Source Initiative

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Learn more about Open Source AI, how do we define it, and its benefits to society.
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Connecting the people and organizations that build and support Open Source.
Explore the latest news, blog posts, newsletters, press mentions, and events from the OSI.
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Open Source has demonstrated that massive benefits accrue to everyone after removing the barriers to learning, using, sharing and improving software systems. These benefits are the result of using licenses that adhere to the Open Source Definition. For AI, society needs at least the same essential freedoms of Open Source to enable AI developers, deployers and end users to enjoy those same benefits: autonomy, transparency, frictionless reuse and collaborative improvement.
When we refer to a “system,” we are speaking both broadly about a fully functional structure and its discrete structural elements. To be considered Open Source, the requirements are the same, whether applied to a system, a model, weights and parameters, or other structural elements.
An Open Source AI is an AI system made available under terms and in a way that grant the freedoms1 to:
These freedoms apply both to a fully functional system and to discrete elements of a system. A precondition to exercising these freedoms is to have access to the preferred form to make modifications to the system.
The preferred form of making modifications to a machine-learning system must include all the elements below:
The licensing or other terms applied to these elements and to any combination thereof may contain conditions that require any modified version to be released under the same terms as the original.
For machine learning systems,
The preferred form to make modifications to machine learning systems also applies to these individual components. “Open Source models” and “Open Source weights” must include the data information and code used to derive those parameters.
The Open Source AI Definition does not require a specific legal mechanism for assuring that the model parameters are freely available to all. They may be free by their nature or a license or other legal instrument may be required to ensure their freedom. We expect this will become clearer over time, once the legal system has had more opportunity to address Open Source AI systems.
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