Read the license
Choose what you want to do with a model. Each license's answer comes from its own text, quoted below.
MIT License: allowed; Apache License 2.0: allowed; OpenRAIL-M (BigScience): allowed, with conditions; Llama 4 Community License: allowed, with conditions; Gemma Terms of Use: allowed, with conditions; CC BY-NC 4.0: not allowed; A closed model (OpenAI's terms): allowed, with conditions
Use it in a product people pay for: Yes
Selling is named in the grant. The one condition, keeping the notice, applies to copies you hand out.
The text (Grant)
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software ... to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software
Used by: CLIP ViT-B/32 (on this site), DeepSeek-R1
Use it in a product people pay for: Yes
The patent grant names selling, and nothing limits commercial use. The notice conditions apply to copies you hand out.
The text (Section 3)
patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work
Used by: SmolLM2 (on this site), Gemma 4, Qwen3, gpt-oss, OLMo 2
Use it in a product people pay for: With conditions
Commercial use is not restricted, but neither you nor your users may use it for a restricted use, such as giving medical advice.
The text (Section 5 and Attachment A)
You cannot use the Model and the Derivatives of the Model for the specified restricted uses. ... You shall require all of Your users who use the Model or a Derivative of the Model to comply with the terms of this paragraph (paragraph 5). ... (l) To provide medical advice and medical results interpretation
Used by: Supertonic 2 (on this site)
Use it in a product people pay for: With conditions
Allowed if you show “Built with Llama”, include a copy of the agreement with any Llama files you share, and follow the acceptable use policy.
The text (Section 1.b.i)
If you distribute or make available the Llama Materials (or any derivative works thereof), or a product or service (including another AI model) that contains any of them, you shall (A) provide a copy of this Agreement with any such Llama Materials; and (B) prominently display “Built with Llama” on a related website, user interface, blogpost, about page, or product documentation.
Used by: Llama 4 Scout and Maverick
Use it in a product people pay for: With conditions
Allowed within the prohibited use policy, which Google may update; Google may also restrict use it believes breaks the terms.
The text (Section 3.2)
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Google reserves the right to restrict (remotely or otherwise) usage of any of the Gemma Services that Google reasonably believes are in violation of this Agreement.
Used by: Gemma 1, 2, and 3
Use it in a product people pay for: No
A product people pay for is commercial.
The text (Section 1(i))
NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.
Used by: Depth Anything V2 Base and Large
A closed model (OpenAI's terms)
Terms of service; no weights. You cannot download the weights.
Allowed, with conditions
Use it in a product people pay for: With conditions
Allowed through the provider's paid service, under its business terms and usage policies.
The text (Services Agreement, 2.2)
This includes the right to use OpenAI’s API to integrate the Services into Customer Applications and to make Customer Applications available to End Users.
Used by: GPT models in ChatGPT and the API
Challenges
0 of 4 complete
- Find a plan that every license with downloadable weights allows, but the closed model's terms forbid. (not yet)
- Find a plan that MIT and Apache 2.0 allow with no conditions, while every other license with downloadable weights attaches conditions. (not yet)
- Find a plan for more than 700 million users a month that the Llama 4 license allows. (not yet)
- Find a plan that OpenRAIL-M (the license of this site's speech model), Llama 4, and Gemma all forbid, but the MIT License allows. (not yet)
Try this
- Choose only Download it and run it on your own computer. Which licenses attach conditions even to that, and which terms say no?
- Add Use it in a product people pay for. One license with downloadable weights now says no.
- Choose Offer it to more than 700 million users a month and open the Llama 4 clause. Whose users does it count, and when?
- Choose Post what it writes as if a person wrote it and compare the classic open source licenses with the newer AI licenses.
Combining a license's answers for a planPython with the standard library
# What three licenses say about four actions, read from their texts.
# "silent" means the license does not address it, so it does not forbid it.
# Llama 4's "huge" is a condition, not a no: its separate license applies only
# to companies that already had over 700 million monthly users at release.
answers = {
"Apache 2.0": {"run": "yes", "sell": "yes", "huge": "yes", "human": "silent"},
"Llama 4": {"run": "conditions", "sell": "conditions", "huge": "conditions", "human": "no"},
"CC BY-NC 4.0": {"run": "conditions", "sell": "no", "huge": "conditions", "human": "silent"},
}
def verdict(license, plan):
found = [answers[license][action] for action in plan]
if "no" in found:
return "not allowed"
if "conditions" in found:
return "allowed, with conditions"
return "allowed"
for plan in (["run"], ["run", "sell"], ["huge"], ["human"]):
print(" + ".join(plan))
for name in answers:
print(f" {name:13} {verdict(name, plan)}")run
Apache 2.0 allowed
Llama 4 allowed, with conditions
CC BY-NC 4.0 allowed, with conditions
run + sell
Apache 2.0 allowed
Llama 4 allowed, with conditions
CC BY-NC 4.0 not allowed
huge
Apache 2.0 allowed
Llama 4 allowed, with conditions
CC BY-NC 4.0 allowed, with conditions
human
Apache 2.0 allowed
Llama 4 not allowed
CC BY-NC 4.0 allowed