Readit News Vendor lock-in: AFAIK it now uses a proprietary llama.cpp fork and builts its own registry on ollama.com in a kind of docker way (I heard docker ppl are actually behind ollama) and it's a bit difficult to reuse model binaries with other inference engines due to their use of hashed filenames on disk etc.
Closed-source tweaks: Many llama.cpp improvements haven’t been upstreamed or credited, raising GPL concerns. They since switched to their own inference backend.
Mixed performance: Same models often run slower or give worse outputs than plain llama.cpp. Tradeoff for convenience - I know.
Opaque model naming: Rebrands or filters community models without transparency, biggest fail was calling the smaller Deepseek-R1 distills just "Deepseek-R1" adding to a massive confusion on social media and from "AI Content Creators", that you can run "THE" DeepSeek-R1 on any potato.
Difficult to change Context Window default: Using Ollama as a backend, it is difficult to change default context window size on the fly, leading to hallucinations and endless circles on output, especially for Agents / Thinking models.
If you want better, (in some cases more open) alternatives:
llama.cpp: Battle-tested C++ engine with minimal deps and faster with many optimizations
ik_llama.cpp: High-perf fork, even faster than default llama.cpp
llama-swap: YAML-driven model swapping for your endpoint.
LM Studio: GUI for any GGUF model—no proprietary formats with all llama.cpp optimizations available in a GUI
Open WebUI: Front-end that plugs into llama.cpp, ollama, MPT, etc.What seems to be true is that Ollama wants to be a solution that drives the narrative and wants to choose for its users rather than with them. It uses a proprietary model library, it built itself on llama.cpp and didn't upstream its changes, it converted the standard gguf model weights into some unusable file type that only worked with itself, etc.
Sorry but I don't buy it. These are not intractable problems to deal with. These are excuses by former docker creators looking to destroy another ecosystem by attempting to coopt it for their own gain.
Building a product that we've dreamed of building is not wrong. Making money does not need to be evil. I, and the folks who worked tirelessly to make Ollama better will continue to build our dreams.