Meet Apertus, Switzerland’s open, multilingual LLM
Plus: A new standard for AI licensing, and a campaign to open source Nova Launcher
Hi folks,
The focus in this week’s edition of Forkable is Apertus, a large-scale effort to build a multilingual LLM where everything is made available under a permissive open source licence.
Elsewhere, publishers such as Reddit and Medium collaborated to create an open framework for signalling how AI systems may use their content.
And with the future of Nova Launcher in doubt, the community have stepped up to pressure the owners to open source the code.
Plus more…
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issue
Swiss roll out open, multilingual LLM
It’s no secret that Europe is accelerating efforts to lessen its reliance on technology developed by Big Tech in the U.S. — digital sovereignty, is the name of the game.
With that in mind, in Forkable last month, I reported that Switzerland’s federal tech institutes — ETH Zurich and EPFL — were developing a fully open, multilingual large language model (LLM) using Switzerland's “Alps” supercomputer.
It’s worth noting that this is separate to OpenEuroLLM, another collaborative European effort to develop open, multilingual LLMs.
Now, researchers have formally unveiled Apertus, pitched as Switzerland’s first large-scale effort to build a foundational LLM where everything — from the architecture to the weights, training data, and recipes — is made available under a permissive open source licence.
Apertus comes in two distinct flavours: one with eight billion parameters, intended for lighter use; and a larger 70-billion-parameter model, designed for more demanding applications.
What distinguishes Apertus from many existing language models is its multilingual foundation. Trained on around 15 trillion tokens across more than 1,000 languages, with roughly 40 percent of its data coming from non-English sources, it covers widely spoken tongues as well as underrepresented ones such as Swiss German and Romansh.
The team behind the model highlights transparency, inclusivity, and digital sovereignty as guiding principles. By releasing every layer of the model to the public, they hope to enable researchers, educators, and industry to inspect, adapt, and experiment without the restrictions that typically accompany proprietary systems.
Still, practical challenges remain: running such models requires significant infrastructure, from servers to cloud platforms, which could limit accessibility.
“Apertus demonstrates that generative AI can be both powerful and open,” says Antoine Bosselut, professor and head of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory at EPFL, and co-lead of the Swiss AI Initiative. “The release of Apertus is not a final step, rather it’s the beginning of a journey, a long-term commitment to open, trustworthy, and sovereign AI foundations, for the public good worldwide. We are excited to see developers engage with the model at the Swiss {ai} Weeks hackathons. Their creativity and feedback will help us to improve future generations of the model.”
Looking ahead, the project’s roadmap includes domain-specific adaptations in fields like healthcare, law, and education, alongside efficiency improvements and broader user feedback.
Read more: ETH Zurich press release
Patch notes
A new standard for AI licensing
Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and others have introduced the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, an open framework for signalling how AI systems may use their content. Unlike robots.txt, which only allows or blocks crawlers, RSL lets sites specify licensing and royalty terms — from subscriptions to pay-per-inference models. The initiative, backed by the nonprofit RSL Collective, aims to set clear rules for content use by AI while borrowing lessons from open source metadata standards.
Read more: The Verge | RSL Standard
Will Nova Launcher go open source?
Kevin Barry, the longtime developer of Nova Launcher — one of Android’s most popular home screen replacements — has stepped away after more than a decade, leaving uncertainty about the app’s future. With no clear succession plan from its parent company, Branch (which acquired Nova in 2022), fans have launched a campaign urging the company open-source Nova Launcher, so the community can continue development.
Read more: The Verge | Change.org
Oracle cuts MySQL dev staff, sparking concern
Oracle has laid off about 70 people from its MySQL development team, prompting alarm among open source watchers. Monty Widenius, one of MySQL’s original creators, said he was “heartbroken” by the move. Critics suggest Oracle may be shifting focus away from the Community Edition in favour of its proprietary analytics and cloud services.
Read more: The Register
Npm supply chain attack averted
A potential supply chain attack on the npm registry was thwarted after a maintainer’s account was compromised and used to publish malicious packages. The incident, which could have impacted widely used libraries, was quickly contained, with the malicious versions removed before they were broadly downloaded.
Read more: Infosecurity Magazine
Fedora adds atomic KDE edition
Linux distribution Fedora has released a new variant built around the KDE Plasma desktop, aimed at users who want a simple and reliable entry point into Linux. It uses Fedora’s atomic desktop model, where updates are applied in a rollback-friendly way, borrowing from open source projects like Silverblue and Kinoite.
Read more: ZDNET
And finally…
Crowdfunding an open source Game Boy clone
The Game Bub is a fully open source handheld console that recreates the Game Boy using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware.
Supporting original cartridges and accessories, the Game Bub lets players load ROMs or homebrew via microSD. It’s ultimately designed for hacking, with features like rumble, sensors, and an expansion slot for custom add-ons.
A crowdfunding campaign is currently live for The Game Bub, and it has raised more than $70,000 of its $100,000 target at the time of writing.
Read more: Crowd Supply