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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Yup. An extremist wing of the FOSS movement ceded the debate early on by trying to insist open source required full access to the training data. Philosophically, not wrong. But practically fucked, so the word evolved.

Within tech circles, open weight != open source. Outside them, they’re synonyms.

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Training data without the training regime is useless. A cake is not open source because they list the ingredients.

Open source captures a practical utility as well as a philosophy. When those two cease to converge, the practical prerogative wins.

The correct battle would have been weights + regime. But extremists insisted on data, too, which left Meta as the only other real voice arguing with anything practical. They had open weights. I think eventually open use was negotiated and that closed the case except for the folks still arguing about how to pronounce GIF.

Isn't open source not the ingredients but the recipe?

Wrong. The data (and compute) matters infinitely more than the training regime/architecture. This is the Bitter lesson.

I could rerun Kimi K3 with full transformers instead of the hybrid mamba architecture and it would only get better.

Example: The first time I saw the New York Times use “Open Source” in a headline, what they meant was open weights.

Alright, not Open Source but Free Slopware. This time the meaning of "free" is quite clear.

also, you can do a lot to finetune or repurpose an open weight model. much more easily than you can mod closed source binaries.

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