in July 2023, we [Hugging Face] wanted to experiment with a custom license for this specific project [text-generation-inference] in order to protect our commercial solutions from companies with bigger means than we do, who would just host an exact copy of our cloud services.
The experiment however wasn't successful.
It did not lead to licensing-specific incremental business opportunities by itself, while it did hamper or at least complicate the community contributions, given the legal uncertainty that arises as soon as you deviate from the standard licenses.
Recent articles
- The Summer of Johann: prompt injections as far as the eye can see - 15th August 2025
- Open weight LLMs exhibit inconsistent performance across providers - 15th August 2025
- LLM 0.27, the annotated release notes: GPT-5 and improved tool calling - 11th August 2025