Open Source
Software whose licence says what you may do with it, and what you must share.
Open source is a licensing promise, not a price. The licence grants you rights to use, modify, and redistribute the software, and states the obligations that come with them: publish the modified source, keep the notice, or do not use it commercially.
For AI systems, the same question applies with a wrinkle: what is actually being licensed. A permissive licence on the code does not settle the question of the weights, the training data, or the outputs.
Teams building on open models should read the licence once, properly, and keep a note of it. It is the difference between a dependency you can use and a dependency that can take your product down.
Related terms
Open-weight Model
A model whose weights you can download and run yourself, under a licence that says what you may do.
IP
Who owns what the model produced, and what it was trained on.
Model
The trained file of learned parameters that turns input into output.
Compliance
Meeting the legal rules that apply to what you built, in the place you built it.
License
The legal permission to use something, and the conditions attached to it.
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