[hafriedlander]

Yeah, neither view is a perfect fit. Another example is vision transformer backbones, where a common generic base weight is used to fine-tune all sorts of different processes (segmentation, image to text, etc). The terminology (and licenses) haven't really kept up.

A properly unencumbered model would be my preference too. The community generally seems a bit laissez-faire with license compliance though, so the restrictions currently don't generate much push back. (Plus it's not totally clear that you can copyright model weights at all, given they're the output of an automatic process).