[petcat]

OK so replace the Photoshop example with a compiled GIMP or shareware binary. It doesn't change the fact that it is not open source.

The free software community complains all the time about binary blobs that are otherwise legal to freely distribute. Like firmwares. But somehow this is all overlooked with these "open weight" models.

[est31]

> The free software community complains all the time about binary blobs that are otherwise legal to freely distribute. Like firmwares.

With software there are two things: the source code, and the binary.

Firmware usually has restrictions on modification, so it violates the four freedoms.

Open weights is not perfect, but at least you can finetune as you wish, and for example add more knowledge about the current day to those models, or give it knowledge about company internals so you don't need to put stuff into the context.

Many smaller AI labs finetune chinese models and release the result. Finetuning is very valuable!

[elpocko]

I agree with you in general, it's not "Open Source". But in many cases you're allowed to fork them, and create and distribute derivative works (finetunes) from open models, and the training and inference code is also permissively licensed. That's not shareware.

And working with the binary weights of a huge pretained model is much easier and cheaper than doing it based on the entirety of its humongous source datasets.

[SwellJoe]

I'm not at all disagreeing with you about calling these models "open source". They mostly aren't and we should stop conflating the two things.

[thewebguyd]

I think using the term "open" at all in relation to these models is a misnomer. Much in the same way we've spent a lot of time and effort distinguishing "open source" from "source available"

Perhaps instead of "Open weight model" it should be "Weights available model"

[SwellJoe]

Definitely, but there's also a distinction between "weights available" and "you can do stuff with those weights". There are models you can download but the license prohibits redistribution, fine-tuning, etc. The earlier Gemma models had license encumbrances, for instance, that Gemma 4 do not.

[jrm4]

But again, I think you're dancing around "Stallman was right," which is frankly why I come to the reverse idea.

I think it is fine to call these things "open" because "open" was loosey-goosey already. It wasn't Free.

[DonHopkins]

Lord forbid open source models have as horrible a user interface as GIMP!