Problem is, the literal/default definition of "open source" is meaningless/worthless in this context. It's the weights, training data and methodology that matter for those models - NOT the inference shell.
It's basically like giving people a binary program and calling it open source because the compiler and runtime used are open source.
The weights are the inference and result of training. I can give you all the training details and you might not be able to reproduce what I did (google does this all the time). As a dev, I’d much rather an open model over an open recipe without weights. We can all agree having both is the best case scenario but having openly licensed weights is for me the bare minimum of open source
The inference runtime software is open, the weights are an opaque binary. Publishing the training data, hyperparameters, process, etc - that would make the whole thing "open source".
Good example. And in fact you are calling the "engine" opensource, not the whole Quake game.
The 'assets" in most "opensource" AI models are not available.
Imagine if the Telegram client was open source but not the backend.
Imagine if Facebook open-sourced their front-end libraries like React but not the back-end.
Imagine if Twitter or Google didn’t publish its Algorithm for how they rank things to display to different people.
You don’t need to imagine. That’s exactly what’s happening! Would you call them open source because their front end is open source? Could you host your own back end on your choice of computers?
It's a bit different - here most of the value lies in the weights.
A better analogy would be some graphics card drivers which ship a massive proprietary GPU firmware blob, and a small(ish) kernel shim to talk with said blob.
Well perhaps we can consider this a kind of short-sightedness of Stallmann. His point with GPL and the free software movement, as I understand it, was to ensure the user could continue to use the software regardless of what the software author decided to do.
Sometimes though the software alone can be near useless without additional assets that aren't necessarily covered by the code license.
Like Quake, having the engine without the assets is useless if what you wanted was to play Quake the game. Neural nets are another prime example, as you mention. Simulators that rely on measured material property databases for usable results also fall into this category, and so on.
So perhaps what we need is new open source licenses that includes the assets needed for the user to be able to reasonably use the program as a whole.
It's basically like giving people a binary program and calling it open source because the compiler and runtime used are open source.