What does this equation mean?

A minimal formal statement of what this means is worth writing out, because it is easy to read past the word “sole discretion” in prose. Call u a licensee’s monthly active users at release, and define licence validity as $L(u) = \begin{cases} 1, & u \le 7 \times 10^{8} \\ g, & u > 7 \times 10^{8} \end{cases}$. where g $\in$ \{0, 1\} is not a fixed rule but a discretionary grant decided by the licensor after the fact. Below the threshold, “open” behaves like a normal permissive licence. Above it, the licence is not denied — it is converted into a negotiation whose outcome the model’s own publisher controls. That second regime has no counterpart in any license the Open Source Initiative recognises, and it is the specific, cited reason OSI has stated Llama’s licence does not meet the Open Source Definition — first for Llama 2 in 2023, and again in a follow-up post in February 2025 concluding that Llama 3.x “is still not Open Source by any stretch of the imagination” [ 3 ] . That is an institutional standards body’s assertion about a definitional fit, not a claim that the models are unusable or low-quality; Meta, for its part, continues to describe the releases as open. Both things are simultaneously true and the disagreement between them is not a rounding error — it is a real dispute about what the word should mean, and this article takes no side beyond reporting the terms precisely.