Worried about Qwen 4 License
There is concern within the developer community regarding the licensing of Alibaba's Qwen models, specifically whether the custom license used for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next will extend to Qwen4. Developers are worried about the shift away from permissive open-source licenses like Apache and MIT, finding the terms of the custom license ambiguous. Many interpret Qwen3.8-Flash-Next as a preview of Qwen4's licensing strategy, hoping for clearer language or a return to more established open-source terms.
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PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 29, 2026, 09:48 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 29, 2026, 15:01 UTC
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- Oct 29, 2026, 09:48
- Ingested
- Oct 29, 2026, 15:01
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After Alibaba moved from Permissive OSS licenses to its own custom license with IMO ambiguous terms in models like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, is there any indication this will carry forward into Qwen4?
While that license at first reads permissive for local/internal use, fine-tuning and derivatives, it’s definitely not Apache/MIT.
The two big catches are:
- commercial MaaS or a standalone coding/office AI assistant requires a separate Qwen license seemingly from day one, and the wording around outputs is annoyingly vague.
- The internal-use exception says you can’t make the model, its outputs, or capabilities available to third parties, but it never clearly says whether downstream code/data produced indirectly from internal outputs is unrestricted.
The $20M/month or 100M-MAU threshold seems to be an attribution trigger, not the threshold for needing a commercial license.
IMO output ownership needs to be clearly covered in the license, that wasn’t the case when I last checked.
Edit: This is not legal advice but I think it’s fair to highlight. I don’t want to embrace the trend of moving away from tried and tested OSS licenses like apache and MIT. 3.8 Next was interpreted by many as a preview into 4 and thus might seem to imply a new licensing strategy. One could dream and hope the Alibaba team see that people care about this and at least add clearer licensing language.