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by selcuka 973 days ago
How do you define "source", then?

By this logic any freely downloadable executable software (a.k.a. freeware) is also open source, even though they don't disclose all details on how to build it.

1 comments

Source would be the way the data is produced so that you can replicate it yourself and make changes.

If I hand you a beer for free that’s freeware. If I hand you the recipe and instructions to brew the beer that is open source.

We muddy the waters too much lately and call “free” to use things “open source”.

> If I hand you a beer for free that’s freeware. If I hand you the recipe and instructions to brew the beer that is open source.

Yeah, but what those "open source" models are is like you handing me a bottle of beer, plus the instructions to make the glass bottle. You're open-sourcing something, just not the part that matters. It's not "open source beer", it's "beer in an open-source bottle". In the same fashion, those models aren't open source - they're closed models inside a tiny open-source inference script.

Perhaps one more thing that is missing in context is that I'm also getting the right to alter that beer by adding anything I like to it and redistributing it, without knowing its true recipe.