The english word “free” actually carries two meanings: “free as in free food” (gratis) and “free as in free speech” (libre).
Ollama is both gratis and libre.
And about the money stuff: Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model, an answer to ChatGPT and Bing Chat/Copilot. Facebook lagged behind the other players and they just said “fuck it, we’re going open-source”. That’s how and why it’s free.
Due to it being open-source, even though models are by design binary blobs, the code that interacts with them and runs them is open-source. If they were connecting to the Internet and phoning home to Facebook, chances are this would’ve been found out by the community due to the open nature of the project.
Even if it weren’t open-source, since it runs locally you could at least block (or view) Internet access.
Basically, even though this is from Facebook, one of the big bads of privacy on the Internet, it’s all good in the end.
Thank you for the correction!