> It is pretty much exactly akin to a Linux driver that depends on linux-firmware.

The key distinction between the two is "is that the preferred form of modifying that linux driver"? And then "does the license allow you to inspect, modify and re-release that linux driver"? If the answer to any of those questions is "no", then it's not "exactly the same".

> You seem to contradict yourself here.

I don't think so. There are open source models (released under Apache2.0, MIT, like qwens, some mistrals, deepseek, etc.), weights-available models (released under restrictive licenses i.e. llamas, some mistrals, some from cohere, etc) and there are open data models (Apertus, Olmo, etc). The license dictates if a model is open source or weights available. The difference is what you are allowed to do with th emodel.