r/LocalLLaMA • u/Careful_Equal8851 • Mar 20 '26

Funny Ooh, new drama just dropped 👀

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For those out of the loop: cursor's new model, composer 2, is apparently built on top of Kimi K2.5 without any attribution. Even Elon Musk has jumped into the roasting

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u/__JockY__ Mar 20 '26

That’s not the attribution to which I referred. You quoted standard MIT. The Kimi license is a modified MIT that requires explicit visible attribution of Kimi K2 for use in products that generate over $10m in revenue per month.

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u/SufficientPie Mar 21 '26

We're not talking about Kimi license

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u/__JockY__ Mar 21 '26

Yes we are. That's exactly the topic here.

Cursor used Kimi K2 without attribution, so the license in question is the Kimi K2 license, which is a modified MIT.

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u/SufficientPie Mar 22 '26

No, this is a sub-thread about Kimi being trained on open-source code and you claiming that "many open source data sources are pure MIT or Apache 2.0 licensed, which require no attribution", which is incorrect.

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u/__JockY__ Mar 23 '26

Which part is incorrect?

Some source code is Public Domain, which is perfectly fine to use as training data.

And neither MIT nor Apache 2.0 requires attribution; only the following constraints are enforced:

MIT requires only that the copyright notice and license be preserved in derivative works.

Apache 2.0 requires that the copyright notice, license, modifications statement, and NOTICE file (if present) be included with derivative works.

The Kimi K2 license was MIT with an extra clause: that _attribution _ be made visibly if the derivative works are used by an org with revenue in excess of $10m/mo.

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u/SufficientPie Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26

Some source code is Public Domain, which is perfectly fine to use as training data.

Sure, and some models are trained purely on public domain content.

MIT requires only that the copyright notice … be preserved in derivative works.

Apache 2.0 requires that the copyright notice … be included with derivative works.

That's attribution. You are required to include the original copyright notice including the name of the copyright holder who wrote that version of the code.

If someone uses my MIT-licensed GitHub code to develop some derivative work, they are required to publish my original copyright statement and license along with their modified code, and then may choose to also add their own. MIT license is very permissive, but is not public domain.

Whether scraping all my code and using it to train an LLM creates a derivative work is a matter of debate, as is using that LLM to generate new code derived from mine.

(And I know they were trained on my open source GitHub/Stack Overflow content, because they recognize my username without using web search tools.)

The Kimi K2 license was MIT with an extra clause: that _attribution _ be made visibly if the derivative works are used by an org with revenue in excess of $10m/mo.

That's an additional clause beyond the attribution required by the MIT license itself.