⚖️ Open LLM licenses explained: Apache-2.0, MIT, Llama, Gemma and the research-only crowd
Not every open-weight model is open for commercial use in the same way. Here is what the common licenses allow, what they restrict, and what procurement should check.
"Open source" is used loosely in the model world. Some weights ship under licenses the Open Source Initiative would recognise; others under bespoke terms with usage thresholds, field-of-use limits or attribution rules. Below is a practical reading of the licenses you will meet in the catalog.
Permissive: Apache-2.0 and MIT
Used by the Qwen 2.5 and Qwen 3 families, Mistral's open releases, DeepSeek-V3 and R1 (MIT), and many others. Commercial use, modification, redistribution and hosting are all permitted. Apache-2.0 adds an explicit patent grant. Keep the license text and notices with the weights and you are done.
Community licenses: Llama
Meta's Llama licenses allow commercial use but add conditions: an acceptable-use policy, a requirement to display "Built with Llama" in certain cases, and a threshold — organisations above a stated monthly-active-user count at release time must request a separate license. For most enterprises the threshold is irrelevant, but legal should confirm.
Gemma terms
Google's Gemma Terms of Use permit commercial use with a prohibited-use policy and flow-down requirements for derivatives. They are workable for most deployments but are not an OSI license.
Research and non-commercial licenses
Some releases (certain CC-BY-NC weights, research previews, "non-commercial" variants) forbid production use outright. The catalog marks these as non-commercial and the assessment filters them out by default.
Checklist for procurement
- Confirm the exact license of the exact repository you will deploy — fine-tunes and quantised re-uploads can carry different terms from the base model.
- Check field-of-use and acceptable-use clauses against your use case.
- Record attribution requirements in your product documentation.
- For gated repositories, keep evidence that the license was accepted by an authorised person.
None of this is legal advice; it is the map you need before talking to counsel.