Tier 5 Fully open / reproducible
What the publisher claims: open source
The one-liner: Fully open by construction: the artifact is the method.
The six questions
Full source and binaries are downloadable.
Apache 2.0.
Runs on CPU, GPU and distributed backends with no proprietary runtime.
Algorithm, objective, hyperparameters and code are fully public, and the data is the user's own, so there is no hidden corpus to disclose.
A skilled group can rebuild an equivalent implementation from the published algorithm and code.
Community-governed dmlc project with distributed maintainership and a steady stream of merged outside PRs.
License
Apache 2.0 OSI-approved — license source ↗
What is actually released
- library source
- documentation and API reference
- papers
Why it matters
The baseline the open-model debate is measured against; in classical ML, open is the default rather than a concession.
Sources
Derived from the openness dataset behind But Is It Open? — snapshot 2026-11-07 ↗. Scores are qualitative readings of the cited evidence, not verdicts; tier measures openness, not intelligence.