Comment by ekianjo
Comment by ekianjo 2 days ago
Open weights models, not open source. And even their weights are under a specific license not as permissive as apache 2.
Comment by ekianjo 2 days ago
Open weights models, not open source. And even their weights are under a specific license not as permissive as apache 2.
I propose that from now on we call freewares "open binaries".
Does an “open source” model the way you describe it exist or is it a mythical creature?
An open source model does exist now [1] and is multilingual. Previous discussion [2].
[1] https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/07/a-l...
It does, but does it matter? Even if every software released in 2025 was proprietary, doesn't make their published binaries "open source" because no other software could be classified as "open source".
We name things based on what they are, not based on the lack of other things.
This is the right terminology. Model weights are literally compiled binary data; they are the output of an algorithm run on a bunch of source data. That training dataset is the "source" of the model. Training data (or the scripts used to generate it) is human-readable and modifiable, like source code. Binary weights are not.