Question regarding CLIP's model open-sourceness and commerciality
Hello. I’m a beginner here and was really in doubt about CLIP’s and all the finetuned versions of CLIP license. Sentence-transformers clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1 for example has an APACHE 2 license, but is based on OPENAI’s CLIP has a MIT license on github but they state that "Anydeployed use case of the model - whether commercial or not - is currently out of scope.". This is really confusing as I need to make use of open source models for a project ( won’t be commercialized probably, but if it will be then this would be a problem? ).I’m currently working on a project where I need to work with both text + images and perform some similarity searches. CLIP gives me some headache cause I’m really confused whether I can use it for this kind of stuff or not. My other choice ( I don’t know too much about this tho) would be to use two separate models ( One for text embeddings, one for img embeddings) and have them in two different spaces and perform the searches in the appropriate space ( either for text , or for images) and then somehow add them up together, but I’m not sure as to how to proceed.
2024-01-02T08:36:10Z
Hi,OpenAI’s repository mentions commercial usage allowed:CLIP/LICENSE at main · openai/CLIP · GitHub. The model card just mentions that they haven’t assessed commercial applications when releasing the model.
2024-01-03T22:33:53Z
That would mean that I can use “sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1” for example in a commercial app without any legal issues? Thanks !!
2024-01-06T13:26:30Z
claudiu2222XX:sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1Yes, sincehttps://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/clip-ViT-B-32-multilingual-v1has an Apache 2.0 license.
2024-08-07T04:23:21Z
Out-of-Scope Use CasesAnydeployed use case of the model - whether commercial or not - is currently out of scope. Non-deployed use cases such as image search in a constrained environment, are also not recommended unless there is thorough in-domain testing of the model with a specific, fixed class taxonomy. This is because our safety assessment demonstrated a high need for task specific testing especially given the variability of CLIP’s performance with different class taxonomies. This makes untested and unconstrained deployment of the model in any use case currently potentially harmful.This is a piece of text written in the huggingface repo of CLIP. I am confused, the github repo allows commercial use, however the hugging face discourages the commercial usage?So bottom line, can we use CLIP for commercial purpose or not? Thanks!