Comment by Taek
5 hours ago
Everyone that I know considers something to be 'open weight' if the weights are available to the public in some form or another.
In other words, I don't think there's anything misleading happening in the title. When most people discover that certain restrictions exist on using the weights, they will neither be surprised nor disappointed, because the main thing that's being advertised - the weights are available for download - is true!
I work at a university data center and we host open weight models (as usual, this is my private opinion). I would consider open weight something you can take and self-host for free, also commercially and also that you can use for training and research. Anything else is just, I don't know, just "usable for free in certain cases"?
Open source or source available is something else entirely. To consider something source available I would require the actual training data to be available too. That is exceedingly rare.
"Some form or another" is too forgiving. You can't use this commercially at all. Toy purposes only.
If it only restricted resale that would be okay in my book to call open weight. But this license is stifling.
"Open weight" is obviously intended to be analogous to "open source". The name only exists because people rightly complained about people calling weights "open source" when they were not. As such, the most reasonable interpretation is something that obeys the Open Source Definition as closely as possible, but ignores clause 2 because obeying it is legally impossible when the source code infringes copyright (as is the case with almost all LLMs). If it ignores any of the other clauses, it's instead closer to "source available" software, so the correct analogous name is "weights available".