Open, except where you live
Open-weight licences used to restrict what you could do commercially. A licence that restricts where you may be is a different category of thing, and the word has not caught up.
MiniMax published H3's weights on 3 August under a community licence reported to exclude the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea. Royalty-free, research and commercial use permitted — in the rest of the world.
The reporting is secondary and licence text deserves to be read directly before anyone plans around it. Taken at face value, though, it is worth sitting with what it would mean.
Three eras of the word open
First it meant free software: use it, change it, redistribute it, no permission required. Then open weights arrived and it came to mean you may download the parameters, with a licence attached — usually a commercial threshold, occasionally an acceptable-use policy.
A territorial exclusion is a third thing. It is not about what you do or how much money you make. It is about your jurisdiction, which you cannot change by changing your behaviour.
A commercial restriction can be complied with. A geographic one can only be obeyed or violated.
The excluded set is not random
The United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea are, between them, most of the world's active AI regulation and most of its copyright litigation. A licence drawn around exactly those borders is either a compliance decision or a market decision, and from outside the two look identical.
Either reading is informative. If it is compliance, the cost of Western AI regulation is now high enough that a capable lab would rather forgo those markets than meet it. If it is market segmentation, then "open weights" has become a distribution channel with regional rights, like a film licence.
What it does to the scoreboard
The open-weight leaderboard has been the field's favourite proof that capability diffuses. When the strongest open-weight video model cannot lawfully be used by a large share of the people maintaining those leaderboards, the metric measures something other than availability. And the release pattern — API first, weights three days later — shows the word is doing product work as much as engineering work.
The practical advice is dull and important
Read the licence. Not the announcement, not the model card, not the coverage — including this. The gap between what "open weights" implies and what a specific licence permits is now wide enough to build a legal problem in, and it varies per release.
MiniMax — Open General Intelligence: MiniMax H3 Is Now Open Source → · Topview — MiniMax H3 Open Source: What's Free vs API → · RunPod — MiniMax H3: The Open-Weight Omni-Modal Video Model →