RMS found it acceptable to use SunOS initially to create GNU.

Open weight models can be a big boost to building Open AI (cough). Progress comes from incremental improvements, -- and open weight models are a big advance in privacy, security, and autonomy over relying on hosted closed systems.

Source vs not is only one (important!) dimension, moreover in FSF land they define source as being the preferred form for modification, at at least for some kinds of modifications the weights are the preferred form.

> the weights are the preferred form

This can never be the case.

Both the licensing and source aspects of the Free Software movement are aspiring to create high level of equality of access to a [software] work between both the original author and far downstream recipients. Obviously full and universal equality is impossible because part of the work is only in the author's mind and not everyone can obtain and use computers, but approaching that as closely as possible is important and it is important to think about how to achieve a high level of equality for each work in each context. What is "source" in any given context is a choice the author makes about what level of access they want to pass on to others.

In the case of AI, weights can never be the preferred form for modification because of the equality of access issue. The people who trained the AI (and hide its training data/code but published the weights) will always have more access than the people who only have the weights. Just like a binary can almost never be the preferred form, because the authors have access to the source but we don't.

There are also many ways to bias the model and insert backdoors or other suboptimal behaviours into it during training data selection etc.

>RMS found it acceptable to use SunOS initially to create GNU.

Any source on that?