> 2. If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate commercial license with Mistral before using the Model or its derivative works for any commercial purpose. The Licensee may contact Mistral, using this form: https://mistral.ai/contact/, to request a commercial license. [0]

Calling this "open weight" is misleading. That's why we had huge backlash when Redis, Elasticsearch, and Terraform went source-available, right?

Weight-available is a better adjective for this kind of licensing. Same for Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax, etc. If they really want to be open source, they should pick an OSI-approved license.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-4-1T-A52B/blo...

This is the new OSI Open source definition for AI models:

https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

Mistral Large 4 is definitely not open given the "use for any purpose without having to ask for permission" requirement.

> If the Licensee or any of its affiliates operates a Model as a Service business, the Licensee must enter into a separate

Put a JEV on the output to filter out responses that might show its Mistral

Theft is the AI way

We are now at the mercy of labs to provide frontier models as open-weight. Now that even some Chinese labs are releasing their models as weight-available, what stops them from prohibiting certain internal uses of new models? What about public chatbots?

Open models we have now will become obsolete within a few years. Imagine a world where our last open models were from the GPT-2 era.

I believe we need truly sovereign models, not in the Western sense, but from a community perspective. We need a model line that stays open-source across generations.

The weights are open, meaning publicly accessible, but you can't have a business profit off of them without paying for a license. That sounds fair and accurate.

HashiCorp has the same business model for their products: you are free to use them even in a business, except if your business is a competitor of their own cloud solutions.

Isn't it basically settled that model weights can't be copyrighted as they don't pass the threshold of originality?

Releasing weights even with permissive license, doesn't technically make it "open-source", unless all the method, data and technical inner working to do it is also released. Otherwise, it's just a binary floating in the wild, even if it's under MIT.

Unless, i am missing something they haven't claimed open source anywhere. none of them have claimed open source. open weights has never meant the same thing as open source.

Yep and it's the same for Meta's "open" models which you omitted from the list.

Is there actually a competitive proper actually open model?

I don't recall their being a huge backlash to elasticsearch ELv2. Mostly people seemed receptive to blocking the major cloud providers from mooching off the project, and the need to protect their revenue.

People need to make money.

This provider exclusion licenses though.. In a world were someone can point an LLM at your software to launder it.. Not sure what's going to happen.

To the people who demanded completely open source licensed software, or that complained about "they shove Wayland/systemd down our throats", I've said many times that this is a supply/demand problem. Open source licensed software exists because there is a lot of excess software production capacity, e.g. there are many volunteers. Non-systemd distros are rare because such production capacity is low, e.g., there are few volunteers willing to do this work. To those people I've said: stop complaining about others not doing it for you, if you so want your non-systemd distro or FOSS-licensed whatever, you gotta do it yourself and contribute to the community, or fund an effort.

I got super angry reactions.

Now, the same thing is happening with open weights models, but in on a much more extreme scale. They exist because of excess capacity for whatever reason, and they will cease to exist when this excess capacity reduces. There is no use complaining about something not being open weights. What is productive is funding an effort.

Unfortunately, most complainers want others to do things for them, for free.

No, it's open-weights, as in you can inspect them. This is not Free Software.

If they want to be open source, they also need to, y'know, open the source.

Weights are more like an executable binary. The source is the training data etc