Meta’s campaign to corrupt the meaning of Open Source was unfortunately very successful and now most people associate releasing the weights with open source.
It's gratifying. I used to tilt at windmills on HN about this and people would be telling me with absolute condescension how the ship had sailed regarding the definition of Open Source, relegating my own life's work to anachronism.
People slowly waking up to how daft and hypecycle misusing a term was all along has been amazing.
The wildest one is how people say just because you produce open source software you should be happy that multibillion dollar corporations are leeching value from your work while not giving anything back but are in fact making your life harder. That’s the biggest piss on my back and tell me it’s raining bullshit I ever heard and makes me not want to open source a damn thing without feeling like a fool.
I think exactly like this. If I created a tool and it were used for free by billion dollar corporations to enrich themselves, I would consider it a personal loss.
so it wasn't a new campaign, it is at best re-appropriating the term open source in the software community in a way communities outside of software have always been using it, in a way that predates software at all, exists in parallel to the software community, and continues to exist now
There's no reason to believe that weights are copyrightable. The only reason to pay attention to this "license" is because it's enforced by Apple, in that sense they can write whatever they want in it, "this model requires giving ownership of your first born son to Apple", etc. The content is irrelevant.
Pretty sure this is a joke, but the actual license is written by lawyers who know what they are doing:
> “Research Purposes” means non-commercial scientific research and
academic development activities, such as experimentation, analysis, testing
conducted by You with the sole intent to advance scientific knowledge and
research. “Research Purposes” does not include any commercial exploitation,
product development or use in any commercial product or service.
Making 3D worlds like that is impressive. I used to build some VR worlds (hobby) and content generation is a huge time sink. I wonder if this tech will become accessible for that soon.
I don’t agree with this idea that for a model to be open source you have to be able to make a profit off of it. Plenty of open source code licenses doesn’t require that constraint
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, [..]
While most people follow the OSD criteria, there is nothing that says open source software must follow it. Nor is the OSD the only set of criteria or the only definition.
Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.
That's source-available: you get to see the code and learn from it, but if you're not allowed to use it however you want (with as only common restrictions that you must then credit the creator(s) and also allow others the same freedom on derivative works) then it's not the traditional definition of open source
Just curious for those who are informed on this matter... are most research done by foreign born people? What happened to the big STEM push?
I don't mean to stir up political debate... just curious what the reality is, especially given the decline in foreign students coming over in recent year.
I'm not trying to be too pc, but you can't really tell based on someone's name where they were born.
That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot.
Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?
FWIW, many of the researchers on the paper did not study in the U.S. but immigrated after their PhD studies.
I checked the first, middle, and last author: Lars Mescheder got his PhD in Germany, Bruno Lecouat got his PhD in France, Vladlen Koltun got his PhD in Israel.
Apple is also a global company and has offices and research labs world wide. At least a couple of the authors seem to work for Apple but at their German lab.
I’ve been using some time off to explore the space and related projects StereoCrafter and GeometryCrafter are fascinating. Applying this to video adds a temporal consistency angle that makes it way harder and compute intensive, but I’ve “spatialized” some old home videos from the Korean War and it works surprisingly well.
You could use pixi instead, as a much nicer/saner alternative to conda: https://pixi.sh
Though in this particular case, you don't even need conda. You just need python 3.13 and a virtual environment. If you have uv installed, then it's even easier:
git clone https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp.git
cd ml-sharp
uv sync
uv run sharp
I don’t know when Apple turned evil but hard for me to support them further after nearly four decades. Everything they do now is directly opposite of what they stood for in the past.
Apple trying to “open-source” something is pretty relevant. I don’t trust them at all. People constantly go at Microsoft but what Apple has done in the last 15 years is far worse. Their monopolies have had far worse impact than whatever Microsoft ever did with Windows and IE.
Swift language is open source but the entire ecosystem is as closed as they get. The fact that no one is building anything outside of the ecosystem says everything about Swift and Apple’s intent. The fact that they still won’t support Linux on M chips also says they don’t care.
What would your definition of "instantly" be? I would argue that, compared to taking minutes or hours, taking less than a second is fast enough to be considered "instant" in the colloquial definition. I'll concede that it's not "instant" in the literal definition, but nothing is (because of the principle of locality).
> (...) Now, if I tell someone: "You should come to dinner more punctually; you know it begins at one o'clock exactly"—is there really no question of exactness here? because it is possible to say: "Think of the determination of time in the laboratory or the observatory; there you see what 'exactness' means"? "Inexact" is really a reproach, and "exact" is praise. (...)
It seems like it, although the shipped feature doesn’t allow for as much freedom of movement as the demos linked here (which makes sense as a product decision because I assume the farther you stretch it the more likely it is to do something that breaks the illusion)
The “scenes” from that feature are especially good for use as lock screen backgrounds
Apple is not a serious company if they can't even spin up a simple frontend for their AI innovations. I should not have to install anything to test this.
Literally what this model does- create seemingly 3d scenes from 2d images, in the iOS photos app. It works even better when you take a real spatial image, which uses dual lenses.
Ah great. Easier for real estate agents to show slow panning around a room, with lame music.
I guess there are other uses?? But this is just more abstracted reality. It will be innacurate just as summaried text is, and future peoples will again have no idea as to reality.
For panning you don't need a 3D view/reconstruction. This also allows translational camera movements, but only for nearby views. Maybe I am overly pedantic here, but for HN I guess thats appropriate :D
"Exclusively for research purposes" so not actually open source.
The only reference seems to be in the acknowledgement, saying that this builds ontop of open source software
Though I'm sure they will shut their shop asap now that Nvidia basically bought them.
People slowly waking up to how daft and hypecycle misusing a term was all along has been amazing.
Open Source =/= free or software, just readable
so it wasn't a new campaign, it is at best re-appropriating the term open source in the software community in a way communities outside of software have always been using it, in a way that predates software at all, exists in parallel to the software community, and continues to exist now
Any of the code that wraps the model or makes it useful is subject to copyright. But the weights themselves are as unrestricted as it gets.
I'm going to match this energy whenever I see it.
https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp/blob/main/LICENSE
> “Research Purposes” means non-commercial scientific research and academic development activities, such as experimentation, analysis, testing conducted by You with the sole intent to advance scientific knowledge and research. “Research Purposes” does not include any commercial exploitation, product development or use in any commercial product or service.
I'm writing open desktop software that uses WorldLabs splats for consistent location filmmaking, and it's an awesome tool:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iD999naQq9A
This next year is going to be about controlling a priori what your images and videos will look like before you generate them.
3D splats are going to be incredibly useful for film and graphics design. You can rotate the camera around and get predictable, consistent details.
We need more Gaussian models. I hope the Chinese AI companies start building them.
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, [..]
Open source means the source is available. Anything else is just political.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685
Just curious for those who are informed on this matter... are most research done by foreign born people? What happened to the big STEM push?
I don't mean to stir up political debate... just curious what the reality is, especially given the decline in foreign students coming over in recent year.
That said, the US only has some 5% of the worlds population (albeit probably a larger proportion of the literate population), so you'd only expect some fraction of the world's researchers to be US born. Not to mention that US born is an even smaller fraction of births (2.5-3%, by Google), so you'd expect an even smaller fraction of US born researchers. So even if we assume that we're on par with peer countries, you'd only expect US born researchers to be a fraction of the overall research population. We'd have to be vastly better at educating people to do otherwise, which is a longshot.
Obviously this makes turning away international students incredibly stupid, but what are we to do against stupidity?
2. People who were born outside the United States but moved here to do research a while back don’t suddenly stop doing research here.
I checked the first, middle, and last author: Lars Mescheder got his PhD in Germany, Bruno Lecouat got his PhD in France, Vladlen Koltun got his PhD in Israel.
https://github.com/TencentARC/StereoCrafter https://github.com/TencentARC/GeometryCrafter
I’d be keen too.
Though in this particular case, you don't even need conda. You just need python 3.13 and a virtual environment. If you have uv installed, then it's even easier:
"Less than a second" is not "instantly".
> (...) Now, if I tell someone: "You should come to dinner more punctually; you know it begins at one o'clock exactly"—is there really no question of exactness here? because it is possible to say: "Think of the determination of time in the laboratory or the observatory; there you see what 'exactness' means"? "Inexact" is really a reproach, and "exact" is praise. (...)
The “scenes” from that feature are especially good for use as lock screen backgrounds
doesn't seem very accurate, no idea of the result with a photo of large scene, that could be useful for level designers
I guess there are other uses?? But this is just more abstracted reality. It will be innacurate just as summaried text is, and future peoples will again have no idea as to reality.
In fact you can already turn any photo into spatial content. I’m not sure if it’s using this algorithm or something else.
It’s nice to view holiday photos with spatial view … it feels like you’re there again. Same with looking at photos of deceased friends and family.