Indeed. We now live in a world where freeware is named open source. We are very sorry, Stallman.

I'm reserving that complaint for "open source" models which are released under non-open-source licenses.

I care that I know what I can DO with the project when I see it described as "open source".

Devils advocate here: I can give you a binary of my open source MIT code and never phone you the code. The code is still MIT licensed, and open source. You just have no access to it.

That said, I entirely agree that MS is misrepresenting their openness here, which isn’t in the least surprising.

> we should stop calling this type of model open source. They are indeed "open weight”

This ship has sailed. It’s now in the same category as hacker/cracker and the pronunciation of GIF.

At least it's MIT licensed! As much as non-open training data irks me, restrictive licensing irks me more!

What you said makes a lot of sense. Free software should not be confused with open source

I mean, you have "AI" which means just about anything in marketing speak, "Agentic" is kind of becoming similar, hopefully they don't goof that one too badly, would be nice to know what you are trying to sell me. Used to be "Cloud" meant storage not just hosting (I guess it still does).

Then there's "Smart" in front of Car, Phone, TV, and so on... Meaning different things.

I do think "Open Weight" should be more commonly used. There's definitely communities that spring up that build the training infrastructure and inference infrastructure around open models on the other hand.

Open weights is not exactly right either because we do get source of the software that uses those open weights.

Maybe open inference?

But we often also get source code for fine tunning the model.

So maybe it's closer to open source than to anything else?

Isn't it a bit like not calling a game open source because engine tooling used to made it isn't open source and they didn't publish .psd files with asset designs?

I'm genuinely torn on this one; I get technically why not, but why I think I have no problem with it is the wishy-washiness of "open source" generally.

As I teach this stuff to people newer to this tech, it's probably just easier and more helpful to refer to the wide array of "stuff you can just download and use yourself" as "open-source" and then after that, go deeper and talk about why Stallman was right, how "Free Software" was first. etc.

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Openwashing is the new greenwashing, which, coincidently, seems to have gone out of fashion a few hundred datacentres ago.