Look, there's a very simple way we can prove or disprove if ollama is doing something wrong. The MIT license (which llama.cpp uses) requires that their copyright notice accompany their source code. Here we can see that ollama is using llama.cpp (there's no secret about that) but they don't have any llama.cpp source code in their repo apparently https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aollama%2Follama+Georgi+Ge... since they appear to be building it as a static library separately as some kind of workflow in their CI system.

But here's the twist: the MIT license requires that the copyright notice be distributed with the binary forms as well. That does not mean advertising. They're not required to mention it in their website or in their communiqués. The bare minimum requirement is that the copyright notice be present in their release artifacts.

llamafile solves this by embedding the copyright notice inside your llamafiles.

    $ grep 'Georgi Gerganov' llamafile-0.6.2
    grep: llamafile-0.6.2: binary file matches

So that way you don't have to worry about giving credit and can continue having a nice single file binary. The code which does that is here: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile/blob/9c53c272650bb...

So let me install the latest Ollama on my Windows computer and see if they're doing this too. https://justine.lol/tmp/ollama-license-violation.png It would seem the answer is no. So yes, ollama appears to be violating the llama.cpp license, and probably the licenses of many other projects too. But not for the reasons we were discussing earlier.

Let's try Linux.

    $ curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
    $ grep -R 'Georgi Gerganov' /usr/local/bin/ollama
    $?=1 $

Oops. They're violating the license on Linux too. It's also a little creepy that it used sudo on its own. So I've filed an issue here: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185