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.
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!
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.
Perhaps instead of "Open weight model" it should be "Weights available model"
I think it is fine to call these things "open" because "open" was loosey-goosey already. It wasn't Free.