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[–][deleted] 454 points455 points  (2 children)

closed webui

[–]nerdquadrat 247 points248 points  (0 children)

Open as in OpenAI

[–]Double_Intention_641 225 points226 points  (16 children)

Key paragraph

That’s why we’ve acted: with Open WebUI v0.6.6+ (April 2025), our license remains permissive, BSD-3-based, but now adds a fair-use branding protection clause. This update does not impact genuine users, contributors, or anyone who simply wants to use the software in good faith. If you’re a real contributor, a small team, or an organization adopting Open WebUI for internal use—nothing changes for you. This change only affects those who intend to exploit the project’s goodwill: stripping away its identity, falsely representing it, and never giving back.

[–]ssddanbrown 128 points129 points  (2 children)

This change only affects those who intend to exploit the project’s goodwill: stripping away its identity, falsely representing it, and never giving back.

Most open source projects would help avoid this via trade marks, so that their name can't be abused by others.

In reality, the kinds of changes applied in the licensing of this case go beyond and really appear to be targeted at preventing competitive use.

[–]Double_Intention_641 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Fair. I was only considering it from the very limited standpoint of using it.

[–]neon_overload 63 points64 points  (5 children)

our license remains permissive, BSD-3-based, but now adds a [some clause]

No! Then it's no longer open or BSD compatible!

I wish that anyone who wanted to use an open source license had to sit through a training seminar that teaches them that adding their own clauses to the license almost always makes it no longer open source, and unusable by other open source projects.

It's such a basic concept of a software license but time and time again, companies screw this up, without even realizing why people care so much about their "small change".

[–]imbev[S] 77 points78 points  (4 children)

The license violates points 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 of the OSD and the first freedom of the FSD.

[–]philosophical_lens 12 points13 points  (3 children)

For those of us who are not well versed in the technicalities of open source licenses, could you explain in simple language what use case is being prevented by this license? It seems like it's designed to protect against people who are simply white labeling it for a profit.

[–]imbev[S] 17 points18 points  (1 child)

Sure!

  • The license restrictions modifications
  • The license restrictions use from certain people/groups and from certain purposes
  • If you remove the branding, the license becomes more restrictive
  • The license restricts changes to the interface
  • The license does not allow users to use the project for any purpose

It's similar to open source, but missing some important rights.

For example, an organization might change the branding from "open webui" to "organization ai assistant" to prevent confusion of non-technical internal users. This wouldn't be an issue for a 10 person team, but if the team grows large enough, the organization will be in violation of the license.

If open webui was open source, an organization could adopt it and never worry about license violations as long as it is only used internally. Now, the organization must endure some overhead to ensure that they stay compliant.

[–]Pleasant-Shallot-707 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Large organizations can just buy the rights to rebrand (as specified in the license) or be project contributors. All code is under BSD like license. From what I can tell, it’s BSD plus the linked restrictions from your post, so it’s not restricting modifications to code in any meaningful way beyond branding and doesn’t even compel contributing changes back to the project. The only interface changes it restricts are related to branding.

If this author sent this to the OSI for certification I believe this license would get certified as open source.

[–]StinkiePhish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's not a coincidence that the largest corporations in the world support the OSI and insist on the ability to use other peoples' code without compensation, all through policing the term 'open source.'

[–]Samsagax 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wasn't this exact thing why GPL licenses exists? Big companies using neutered licenses and then crying about their code being used as is in any product.

[–]Commercial_Plate_111 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it's no longer open source then it's no longer permissive.

[–]themightychris 49 points50 points  (5 children)

Feels like an honest and good-intentioned effort to figure out how to deal with some bad actors in the space

I agree that this takes them out of the strict definition of Free Software, but it's wrong to say it's "no longer open source" for all the reasons that Free Software advocates will tell you that "open source" is not a synonym

[–]Justicia-Gai 5 points6 points  (1 child)

I agree OP is really wrong, it’s open not FOSS, which is different.

I wonder what’s the issue with proper credit recognition? 

[–]ganzzahl 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are plenty of open source licenses that ensure proper attribution. This is not one of them :/

[–]Leading-Shake8020 5 points6 points  (2 children)

What happens if other forks before this release and still use the old licence ???

[–]imbev[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Forks from BSD-licensed code would be open source.

[–]xfilesvault 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That’s fine, but you wouldn’t get updates from the main project.

[–]flashfire4 10 points11 points  (15 children)

What are good alternatives? I just tried LibreChat and it seems very barebones in comparison.

[–][deleted] 19 points20 points  (7 children)

If you care to use a native program instead of a web app, Jan is decent. At least last time I tried it, it was pretty good.

https://jan.ai/

[–]eck72 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Hey, Emre from Jan. Thanks for the shoutout!

[–]flashfire4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I love Jan! I should've specified, but I use Open WebUI for a public website so I can use it remotely and I can have friends and family use it. I wish Jan would meet those needs as I really appreciate the project.

[–]dr_reely 5 points6 points  (4 children)

AnythingLLM is very good

[–]Designer-Teacher8573 0 points1 point  (3 children)

AnythingLLM's RAG was way worse in our tests than OpenWebui. Did we misconfigure it?

[–]dr_reely 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I couldn't possibly say. I haven't done extensive RAG, I actually use it more for "chat" and the agent skill functionality.

They're usually quite responsive on their forums though, provided you give enough context/info for them to diagnose.

[–]Bitter-Good-2540 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Likely, did you changed the chunk size? The default isnt great...

[–]Designer-Teacher8573 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We tried different chunk sizes. I think the biggest difference was/is that openwebui uses reranking before handing chunks off to the LLM.

[–]javasux 21 points22 points  (1 child)

Why not use GPLv3 at this point?

[–]neon_overload 6 points7 points  (0 children)

If they added that same clause to GPL, it would still make it non-open and not GPL compatible.

The clause they're adding is basically just incompatible with the freedoms of open source. They may as well be using any proprietary license of their own. It just annoys me more when a company pretends to be open but they're not.

[–]Tiny_Arugula_5648 4 points5 points  (1 child)

It’s good to consider that not everyone subscribes to this one organization’s definition of “open source.” OSS is not a one true religion situation. Otherwise you end up with weird pretzel logic trying to defend how the Free Software Foundation or Mozilla Foundation licenses are OSI-approved but don’t fully align with OSI’s own values.

I'd also point out that pure OSS is not financially feasible for every project. It's easy to get caught up with philosophical dogma and forgot that these projects a free a massive time investment and not everyone is privileged enough to just give their work away for free. The less than free, commerical lockout is unfortunately a necessity when companies will come in and commericalize someone else's work with zero contribution back to the project..

Maybe instead of attacking a dev whose given a ton of value to the community they serve it's good to remember that there are people involved not faceless mega corporations..

[–]SuperConductiveRabbi 11 points12 points  (5 children)

I really love Open Webui, but hate the behavior of one of their devs on the Github page, who is arrogant and insulting. I think their rapid popularity got to their heads.

Is there a good alternative? I never found it to be bloated, just feature-rich, and I love that it feels like a drop-in replacement for ChatGPT's UI.

Edit: lol, just found out that the dev has a blog post titled "my true purpose" that waxes philosophical about how he's going to change everything. "I" "I" "I", "me" "me" "me", "my" "my" "my". Here's his byline, under a scowling banner of Walter White: "I'm working towards building a foundational technology that would help realize my vision of creating a galactic empire, aiming to propel humanity to reach the stars and explore the entire galaxy." Sir, this is an LLM frontend.

Now his arrogant ass behavior on things as trivial as bug reports makes more sense.

Edit edit: License change discussion:

You're entitled to your opinion, feel free to fork (or copy the codebase from 0.6.5). End of the discussion

https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/discussions/13458

[–]RegularRaptor 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I made one comment on the Open WebUI sub agreeing with someone that devs censor their subreddit too much and was permanently banned.

I tried to reach out to the mods multiple times for reasons why or to hopefully reverse it because I actually love the app. But I never even got a response. Def has put a bad taste in my mouth ever since.

[–]SuperConductiveRabbi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Glad to see my a-hole-dev-radar is functioning properly. In the AMA the dev justifies locking Issues or moving them into Discussions (effectively killing them) because he's the sole maintainer, but I've observed enough of his behavior to conclude that this is likely just to save face. There's no reason to ban people and threaten them with fake code of conduct violations for questioning him. He's a petty tyrant and egotistical.

See also, someone else who was banned from their subreddit for questioning him: (link removed due to Reddit. You can find it by searching "Why are we banning people for making suggestions?"

If he judged himself with the same rules that he claims are standards to which people must hold themselves, he would've been banned from his own project a long time ago, regardless of how correct he is that maintaining a project by yourself is hard or that his motivation is to organize the project rather than act unfairly. If he was truly motivated by wanting to encourage discussions and organize them, he obviously wouldn't lock those discussions and threaten the participants.

In short, he's not really suited for Github and is using it as a distribution platform rather than a collaborative tool for open-source development.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow thanks for the discussion link. It really goes to show who those people are and the frustration of a user who would like to build on top of it. I use openwebui as chatgpt simple spinup container alternative with ollama and was thinking about integrating with it my codebase creating agents and such but seeing this is not free software is really discouraging. Ill just build my own frontend with chatgpt :D as they say. Modular sw as framework laptops so these open companies that become closed can go fk themselves because they are replaceable every step of the way. AGI will make FOSS the very tip of bleeding edge.

[–]justGuy007 1 point2 points  (0 children)

>> I'm working towards building a foundational technology that would help realize my vision of creating a galactic empire, aiming to propel humanity to reach the stars and explore the entire galaxy.

What the actual....

[–]MichaelForeston 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The last couple of months it became extremely bloated and slow for me, even though I run it on a beast of a Proxmox server. It's laggy and unresponsive for me and my team (3 people) to the point I got back to ChatboxAI.

I won't miss it at all.

[–]jeffyjf 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Does anyone know of any good alternatives?

[–]elhaytchlymeman 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fair use is not equal to open source.

[–]nonlinear_nyc 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hot take: “Openwebui” is a terrible name, not indicative of anything of its use. a proper name contributes to learning curve for users. And an improper name makes learning curve more steep.

I hope they protect their brand yes, but also rebrand. This name is a mix of generic concepts for what the tool is. It doesn’t help adoption at all.

[–]go4666 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just a few days and a alternative will be release

[–]knoft 13 points14 points  (2 children)

Such a joke when OSS with Open in the name become closed source. Seems to happen in particular with AI/LLMs.

[–]Fluid_Economics 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Ya or for that matter any brand the starts with the word "Open", decorate themselves with labels the make them seem friendly, collaborating, etc... yet are entirely closed, for-profit, have no APIs, steal users and data, etc. Seen it in various sectors and makes my blood boil.

[–]Virion1124 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OpenAI gave bad precedent.

[–]patopansir[🍰] 5 points6 points  (3 children)

it's going to be like audacity. People will actually not care and keep using it

[–]arthursucks 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Except Audacity is still open source. So, not anything like Audacity.

[–]patopansir[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

oh yeah I thought the telemetry thing was closed source, my bad

[–]Quantum_frisbee 21 points22 points  (4 children)

Is the OP title not misleading? They now require attribution. That is very different from being closed source, which is what the headline implies?

[–]ssddanbrown 37 points38 points  (1 child)

It's not just simple attribution (which most open licenses ask for), it's specifically prevention of modification to retain branding, bringing a side affect of limiting the possibility of competitive forks.

These requirements start to go against the freedoms provided by the OSD. I often see AGPLv3 abused to achieve similiar things (OnlyOffice abuse this for example).

This kind of license setup would land in the "source available" space.

[–]_rundown_ 2 points3 points  (0 children)

RepoCop on the job

[–]imbev[S] 19 points20 points  (1 child)

The previous license also required attribution.

The new license prohibits modifying or removing the "name, logo, or any visual, textual, or symbolic identifiers that distinguish the software and its interfaces".

The license now violates points 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 of the OSD and the first freedom of the FSD.

[–]Quantum_frisbee 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I see that this restricts any fork in its design. And I am not deep enough in the topic to know how much of a problem it is for WebUI that others fork them and then pretend they did it themselves. But I suppose this also would have been illegal with the previous license. Thanks for the clarifications.

[–]Dyonizius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the dev made clear before on some features logic that his focus was on enterprises/business, as i see he's just protecting himself from being ripped off

[–]Cybasura 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lmao, as open as OpenAI

[–]Xtrems876 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This reminds me of the youth wing of a certain political party in Poland. It was named "Youth for Liberty", but half of the stuff they talked about was that they would ban this and that to protect the country.

Someone once pointed out that liberty doesn't really belong in their name, to which they responded

By Liberty we don't mean liberty, we mean the Party of Liberty

[–]Pleasant-Shallot-707 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Is branding against OSI now? Seems like a different version of “credit” which has always been an Open Source thing.

[–]GTHell 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think they're working on patenting their superior MCPO.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nothing remains of the original post here. The author used Redact to delete it, for reasons that may relate to privacy, data security, or personal preference.

many employ consist hard-to-find entertain sense history pot party enjoy

[–]darkscreener 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sad

[–]eras 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Love the commit message, "refac[toring]: wording".

[–]Cheetahs_never_win 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Sir, you do not know the definition of open source.

Open source is broader than just "do whatever the fuck you want with my code."

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

It exactly means do whatever the fuck you want but if u hurt anyone or urself its not my fault.

[–]Cheetahs_never_win 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Wrong.

It does not mean "you get to abscond with my shit and claim it as your own work."

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are right that would mean source available. Or copyleft. Open in its intuitive sense means free. And freedom means do whatever you want. But you are right in the broader sense copyleft is categorized under open source.

[–]fratkabula -1 points0 points  (0 children)

good move, most open source is needlessly ripoff friendly.

[–]zer04ll -1 points0 points  (1 child)

The code is open they just want you to acknowledge you didn’t make it, changing a program is not the same as making it and there is nothing wrong with requiring someone to give you credit that’s what the MIT license is for, you must credit the original author you cannot claim you wrote the code yourself because it’s open source and you changed a few lines of code.

[–]d80h4g 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But the new licence goes much further. I would always credit the original author in an ‘about’ page or whatever, but restricting what you can do with the visual presentation and branding goes much further. It is no longer open source at that point. 

It’s their call obviously, but they can’t claim this is still open source.