Community licences are not open licences, and the conditions are in the middle
Apache 2.0 and MIT allow nearly unrestricted commercial use. Llama, Grok and MiniMax ship community licences with conditions worth reading before shipping. The word "open" covers both.
Across the current open-weight field, Apache 2.0 and MIT permit nearly unrestricted commercial use, while community licences — Llama, Grok, MiniMax among them — attach conditions that need reading before anything ships.
The vocabulary has become genuinely misleading. "Open weights" describes a distribution method, not a permission set, and the gap between the two licence families is not cosmetic: user thresholds, field-of-use restrictions, naming requirements, and clauses that terminate on litigation all appear in the community licences and none appear in Apache 2.0.
The practical failure mode is late discovery. A team evaluates on capability, builds a prototype, then discovers at legal review that the terms do not permit the deployment they designed for. That is weeks lost, and it happens because the licence is treated as a formality rather than a specification.
None of this makes community licences unreasonable. A lab investing heavily in a model has legitimate reasons to restrict competitors from reselling it, and most conditions never bind a normal user. But "most users are unaffected" is a different claim from "open", and the industry keeps using the second word for the first situation.
The workable rule is to read the licence at evaluation time and record the specific clause that permits your deployment. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between shipping and re-architecting. The month's largest open video release carries exactly this kind of licence.
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