Interesting points, regardless of how much I disagree with them, so thank you for sharing your views :)

> Think about it this way: just because someone wrote hello world in c and then a compiler translated that into assembly

I understand your point, since it's technically assembly, you could license that assembly under a FOSS license and now the thing you distributed is "open". I agree you could do this, but you shouldn't use "open source" to describe what you're doing there, unless the actual source for building that asm is open too. The binary might be available, but "open source" is something that applies to source code, not to what we distribute. If your source is C and your output is assembly, but you only try to apply a FOSS license to the output, not the source, it'd be a hard sell to call the source is open and available.

The closest I've come to finding some sort of backing to this view I hold is what OSI echos here:

> What if I do not want to distribute my program in source code form? Or what if I don’t want to distribute it in either source or binary form?

> If you don’t distribute source code, then what you are distributing cannot meaningfully be called “Open Source”. And if you don’t distribute at all, then by definition you’re not distributing source code, so you’re not distributing anything Open Source. [...] Open Source licenses are always applied to the source code — so if you’re not distributing the source, then you’re not distributing the thing to which an Open Source license applies

https://opensource.org/faq#non-distribution

Similarly, I wouldn't call a song I release as "open source" (not that it makes much sense in this case) unless the actual "source" of how it was produced is public under a FOSS license, even if you can technically read the sound data however you want, and modify it by patching the audio file. Instead, some other liberal license is more suitable that allows using/modifying/redistributing the output however you want (Creative Commons is common for those use cases), but not a license that is specifically about source code.

> That is semantics. The linux kernel is published in c because it's easier for people to reason in that abstracted language, but it would not suddenly become "closed source" if it were written in asm, assuming it would still be published under an open source license.

I agree with this too, if suddenly the kernel was written in asm, and it's being distributed as asm, then you can license that asm as "open source" and that'd be OK. What wouldn't be "open source", would be if it's written in C, but that C code isn't licensed "open source", but the authors tries to argue that the compiled asm output is "open source". It's output, not source, so you cannot license the output as "open source" as it's missing that last part, the "source".

> In other words, you having access to the "dataset" would not make the weights any easier to work with. They would still be in a "blob" as you call it.

Precisely. So the requirements end up something like: Can I build this thing from scratch myself, granted I have the required equipment + knowledge + time?

For LLM models, at least the training script + the dataset has to be available without restrictions for that to be possible. If they're not available, or available but under restrictions (usage or otherwise), then it's not open source.