alt Hacker NewsYour game example is a great one: If a game didn’t come with its 3D models, sound, level files, game data, or assets of any kind, but its engine was open source, I don’t think anyone would say “hey this game is open source”. They’d say the engine is, but that’s it. All of the above things are not code, but they are part of a game and yes, expected to be included in an open source game.
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Doom pioneered this model, the Doom engine was open-sourced while the assets remained proprietary. This is where projects like Freedoom exist, to create an entirely free software equivalent.
I think this misses the point I was trying to make. Both an open source game and an open weights LLM include the necessary assets. But people seem to be saying, “you need everything that was used to create the assets”. For game art, that would include sketches, prior art used as inspiration, project files that aren’t used by the game engine but were used during the design process, and so on - if you apply the same standard. But I don’t think anyone does.
People refer to games with proprietary assets as open source all the time. The source code is open - the assets are not. For one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201265 / https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason/blob/...
Source as a word has a meaning that doesn't include non-source things.