Everything you just said applies to normal software. Oh no! Big Corp just started a closed fork of their open source codebase! Well, the open source version is still there. The open source community can build off of it.
You may complain that subsequent models are not iterative on the past and so having that old version doesn’t help; but then the data probably changes too so having the old data would largely leave you with the same old model.
Probably not. But if it’s the new data providing the advantage then you’re not exactly better off having the old data and the model vs. just having the model.
The idea would be that another group could fork it and continue adding to the dataset on their own.
As opposed to not being able to fork it at all because an "open source" model actually just means "you are allowed to use this particular release of our mystery box."
