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It was fun because it was open. Now it's just another brand seeking dollars.
"All hardware is located in the United States." If I use local/OSS models it's specifically to avoid running in a country with no data protection laws. It's a big close miss here.
All things considered though, Europe is getting confusing. They have GDPR but now pushing to backdoor encryption within the EU? [1]
At least there isn't a strong movement in the US trying to outlaw E2E encryption.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/eus-encryption-roadmap...
Which brings up the point are truly private LLMs possible? Where the input I provide is only meaningful to me, but the LLM can still transform it without gaining any contextual value out of it? Without sharing a key? If this can be done, can it be done performantly?
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.
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.
It was fun because it was open. Now it's just another brand seeking dollars.
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.
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.
Interested to see how this plays out - I feel like Ollama is synonymous with "local".
There's a small but vocal minority of users who don't trust big companies, but don't mind paying small companies for a similar service. I'm also interested to see if that small minority of people are willing to pay for a service like this.
"All hardware is located in the United States." If I use local/OSS models it's specifically to avoid running in a country with no data protection laws. It's a big close miss here.
I think what matters more here is "All hardware is located outside of China". Located in the US means little because that's not good enough for many regulated industries even within the US. All things considered though, Europe is getting confusing. They have GDPR but now pushing to backdoor encryption within the EU? [1] At least there isn't a strong movement in the US trying to outlaw E2E encryption. [1] https://www.…
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.
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.
Sure, llama.cpp is the real thing, ollama is a wrapper... I would never want to use something like ollama in a production setting. But if I want to quickly get someone less technical up to speed to develop an LLM-enabled system and run qwen or w/e locally, well then its pretty nice that they have a GUI and a .dmg to install.
It was fun because it was open. Now it's just another brand seeking dollars.
I’m not throwing the towel on Ollama yet. They do need dollars to operate, but still provide excellent software for running models locally and without paying them a dime.