Eleven of nineteen open language models use Apache 2.0
The rest split into MIT, modified MIT and four custom licences. Size does not predict which, so read the licence file.
Shipped's open-weights section lists nineteen language models. Eleven ship under Apache 2.0. That count covers this list, not the whole field.
The Apache group spans every size. Beam has 501B parameters 1. Kolibri 1 has 78B 2. Yandex's base model has 80B 3. Qwen3.8-27B has 27B 4. Mellum2.1 has 12B 5. MiniCPM5-2B has 2B, and its training data is open 6. Granite 4.1 8B 7, Ministral 3 8, Step 3.7 Flash 9 and Olmo 3 10 join them. Gemma 4 joins too. Its card shows Apache 2.0, and the item notes that earlier Gemma terms were stricter 11.
Two use plain MIT. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash has a 552B backbone 12. MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL has 1.02T parameters 13.
Two use a modified MIT. Mistral Medium 3.5 is open for commercial and non-commercial use, with exceptions for companies with large revenue 14. Kimi K2 Thinking has both code and weights under a Modified MIT License 15.
Four use custom licences. Kimi K3 has its own Kimi K3 License 16. GLM-5.3 uses a licence named glm-5.3 17. Liquid AI's LFM2.5-24B-A2B uses lfm1.0 18. NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Nano uses the NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License 19.
Size does not predict the licence. Kimi K3, at 2.8T, is the largest on the list and is custom. MiMo, at 1.02T, is MIT. Beam, at 501B, is Apache. LFM2.5, at 24B, is custom.
So a licence name is only a start. The custom group holds both the largest model on the list and one of the smaller ones. Open weights can still carry a revenue limit or a bespoke text. Read the file before you build.
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- Signals cited
- 1Reflection releases Beam, a 501B open-weights MoE under Apache 2.0
- 2Aleph Alpha releases Kolibri 1, a 78B German and English reasoning MoE under Apache 2.0
- 3Yandex releases AliceAI-Foundation-80B-A3B-Base, an Apache 2.0 base MoE for Russian and English
- 4Qwen releases Qwen3.8-27B, a dense 27B vision-language model under Apache 2.0
- 5JetBrains releases Mellum2.1 Thinking, a 12B coding MoE with 2.5B active, under Apache 2.0
- 6OpenBMB releases MiniCPM5-2B, a dense 2B model with open training data, under Apache 2.0
- 7IBM releases Granite 4.1 8B, an Apache 2.0 instruct model for enterprise tasks
- 8Mistral releases Ministral 3, edge models in 3B, 8B and 14B under Apache 2.0
- 9StepFun releases Step 3.7 Flash, a 198B vision-language MoE with 11B active parameters
- 10Ai2 releases Olmo 3, with a fully documented 32B Think model under Apache 2.0
- 11Google DeepMind releases Gemma 4, with a 31B dense model under Apache 2.0
- 12DeepSeek releases V4.1-Flash, a multimodal MoE with a much smaller KV cache, under MIT
- 13Xiaomi MiMo releases MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL, a 1.02T omnimodal MoE under MIT
- 14Mistral releases Medium 3.5, a dense 128B model with a modified MIT licence
- 15Moonshot releases Kimi K2 Thinking, a 1T MoE thinking agent with native INT4
- 16Moonshot releases Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter open-weights multimodal model
- 17Z.ai releases GLM-5.3, a 753B open-weights model aimed at coding and cyber tasks
- 18Liquid AI releases LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a 24B on-device reasoning MoE with 2B active
- 19NVIDIA releases Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B, a hybrid Mamba-MoE reasoning model