Watching ollama pivot from a somewhat scrappy yet amazingly important and well designed open source project to a regular "for-profit company" is going to be sad.

Thankfully, this may just leave more room for other open source local inference engines.

we have always been building in the open, and so is Ollama. All the core pieces of Ollama are open. There are areas where we want to be opinionated on the design to build the world we want to see.

There are areas we will make money, and I wholly believe if we follow our conscious we can create something amazing for the world while making sure we can keep it fueled to keep it going for the long term.

Some of the ideas in Turbo mode (completely optional) is to serve the users who want a faster GPU, and adding in additional capabilities like web search. We loved the experience so much that we decided to give web search to non-paid users too. (Again, it's fully optional). Now to prevent abuse and make sure our costs don't go out of hand, we require login.

Can't we all just work together and create a better world? Or does it have to be so zero sum?

I think this offering is a perfectly reasonable option for them to make money. We all have bills to pay, and this isn't interfering with their open source project, so I don't see anything wrong with it.

Their FOSS local inference service didn't go anywhere.

This isn't Anaconda, they didn't do a bait and switch to screw their core users. It isn't sinful for devs to try and earn a living.

>> Watching ollama pivot from a somewhat scrappy yet amazingly important and well designed open source project to a regular "for-profit company" is going to be sad.

if i could have consistent and seamless local-cloud dev that would be a nice win. everyone has to write things 3x over these days depending on your garden of choice, even with langchain/llamaindex

I don't blame them. As soon as they offer a few more models available with the Turbo mode I plan on subscribing to their Turbo plan for a couple of months - a buying them a coffee, or keeping the lights on kind of thing.

The Ollama app using the signed-in-only web search tool is really pretty good.

> important and well designed open source project

It was always just a wrapper around the real well designed OSS, llama.cpp. Ollama even messes up the names of models by calling distilled models the name of the actual one, such as DeepSeek.

Ollama's engineers created Docker Desktop, and you can see how that turned out, so I don't have much faith in them to continue to stay open given what a rugpull Docker Desktop became.

I remember them pivoting from being infra.hq

It was always a company

Same, was just after a small lightweight solution where I can download, manage and run local models. Really not a fan of boarding the enshittification train ride with them.

Always had a bad feeling when they didn't give ggerganov/llama.cpp their deserved credit for making Ollama possible in the first place, if it were a true OSS project they would have, but now makes more sense through the lens of a VC-funded project looking to grab as much marketshare as possible to avoid raising awareness for alternatives in OSS projects they depend on.

Together with their new closed-source UI [1] it's time for me to switch back to llama.cpp's cli/server.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1meeyee/ollamas...

ollama is YC and VC backed, this was inevitable and not surprising.

All companies that raise outside investment follow this route.

No exceptions.

And yes this is how ollama will fall due to enshittification, for lack of a better word.

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