Meta has served a legal notice to the Heretic Free Software Project, a small open-source initiative working with local large language models - AI models run on your own hardware rather than accessed through a cloud service.
The Heretic project announced it had received the notice from a legal representative acting on behalf of Meta Platforms. The specific legal claims have not been fully disclosed publicly, but the action likely involves Heretic's use of Llama model weights, which Meta distributes under a custom license that restricts certain uses even as the company describes Llama as "open source."
What Meta's License Actually Says
This is the central tension in Meta's AI strategy. Llama models are free to download and run locally - that part is real. But Meta's license prohibits specific uses: training competing models above a certain scale, some commercial uses by companies with large user bases, and other derivative activities that standard open-source licenses like Apache 2.0 or MIT would permit without restriction.
Developers building with local models have operated in a gray area since Llama 2's release in 2023, creating tools, modified versions, and derivative models on top of Meta's weights. Legal notices like this one signal that Meta is willing to enforce those restrictions rather than simply publish them and look the other way.
The practical implication for anyone building a product on Llama: Meta's license is not a standard open-source license. Reading the full terms before shipping something built on Llama weights is not optional. "Meta calls it open source" is not a safe assumption about what you are legally permitted to do with it.
The Heretic project has not yet indicated whether it plans to comply, contest the notice, or shut down. How it responds will likely inform how other projects in the local LLM space assess their own legal exposure under similar licenses.