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.
Time & source
Times shown in UTC
Display time zone: UTC
Local time zone unavailable; showing UTC.
PublishedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 29, 2026, 09:48 UTC
IngestedOffset at this time: UTC+0Oct 29, 2026, 15:01 UTC
- Published
- Oct 29, 2026, 09:48
- Ingested
- Oct 29, 2026, 15:01
- Source type
- Dev community
- Tier
- Community
- Source status
- Sync delayed
Tier is a per-source editorial setting, not a per-item score.
Discussion trend
The percentage is based on collected discussion signal, not new comments or independent people. The curve only compares the same topic across time.
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.