you keep the model. it's never deprecated. with closed ai, you are forced into a new more expensive model every few months. if an open model infra provider does that, you simply switch to another one. it's not in their interest to do that.
When the weights are publically available (and open to use), then there's a free market for hosting that model at least. That's not independence for me, but it's lack of vendor lock-in.
For some of the open models, there's a list of 20-30 providers of the same model on openrouter for example, as an example of the supply.
