Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

jfoster

A lot of the previous Qwen models seem to have used Apache licenses, among others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwen#List_of_models

Unfortunately, it looks like this model is using a much more restrictive license:

https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-Image-2.1/blob/main/LICENSE

View on HN

Calling open-weights as open-source in marketing materials is the usual misrepresentation. But now with the restriction on commercial use (which is against opensource definition) it is not even open-weights, technically it would be more accurate to call it weights-available.

And the only reason source available had any significance is that you could look at something and understand it. Weights are much much more opaque.

It's just freeware.

Though weights can be finetuned and quantized.

Is it legal in this case?

Who cares?

Salivating IP lawyers. There's already blood in the water.

I'm willing to bet a nonzero amount of its training material is GPL, so I'll treat it as GPL licensed instead and use it however the fuck I want.

If AI labs get to ignore licenses, so do we.

Agreed.

It's not going to matter unless you plan to commercially deploy the model, as far as I see.

If you were to generate outputs for commercial use, I think it would still violate this research license, but it's not like they are going to know, are they?

That said, I am disappointed that the model is not actually open-weights as I expected based on the headline.

That seems quite important. Definitely requires any grown up company to have to do a bunch of legal paperwork to use it.

It could have an attempt at steganographic watermarking trained into the model.

It's not going to matter unless you plan to commercially deploy the model, as far as I see.

It's not going to matter then, either. What are they going to do, sue me for copyright infringement?

Yes? If you deploy the model and provide it on Openrouter (or elsewhere) you better have a license.

No need to deploy it publicly. It's 7B, it'll run on a 3090.

You talked about commercially deploying it. Of course nobody cares what you are doing on your own hardware for fun.

Usually the way the licenses are interpreted, if I run it myself and use it to generate $X million in revenue in my own business, I'm subject to the license. In this case, the license seems to cover any commercial usage at all, which would certainly include self-hosting for internal business purposes.

Why even bother demanding such terms? Release the weights or don't release the weights, but this is silly. No one is going to pay them to run or host a 7B static image model.

Why not? If it's cheap enough, and presuming I had any reason to use an image model, I'd consider paying for it on OpenRouter over hosting it myself.

yes, but it uses 17gb VRAM when running a 50 inference steps generation from prompt. Which is more than I expected since a 7B model sounds little.

It’s not entirely clear far part of a model would be copyrightable in the first place - it’s the result of a mechanical process, where the inputs are someone else’s copyrighted works, after all, while copyright requires some form of creative input.

It's called a transformative work. And it is indeed copyrightable or it's able to be protected legally, if that's what you're wondering?

True, but my pockets aren't deep enough to be the one who wants to figure that out in court.

You are not wrong, but will a judge and jury be competent enough to understand the difference after you've spent several hundred thousand in litigation?

You really think Alibaba is going to go around and sue in US courts for something like this?

It’s more of something to scare companies with legal teams. If you’re an individual or hobbyist doing a side project the risk is essentially zero.

I meant in a broader sense that any model ingesting GPL content would be subject to GPL licensing. The problem is that training and copying/integrating are not the same thing, and this is actually a very complex issue to unpack.

> I'm willing to bet a nonzero amount of its training material is GPL

Image data?

> GPL licensed instead and use it however the fuck I want

GPL is not a "use it however the fuck I want" license. Maybe you're thinking of the WTFPL?

> GPL is not a "use it however the fuck I want" license. Maybe you're thinking of the WTFPL?

No. GPL is a "use it however the fuck you want" license. The GPL has no restrictions on *use*, only on redistribution.

Yes, having no restrictions on use is the first and most critical software freedom. The others are there more to help protect the first (IMO). GPL in particular tries to reach quite far to protect all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

Was going to post about this: the last image models with Apache 2.0 license seem to be from 2025, recent Qwen models are "non-commercial use".

I love the non-commercial clauses because of how many people are using these for deceptive ads and “virtual staging” and fake social media accounts. Anything that makes those guys lives harder while still letting me make silly pictures for my kids and tapestries for my D&D campaign feel fine by me.

You think they care about the probably unenforceable license terms?

This achieves absolutely nothing to that end.

People can continue to use closed SOTA models to generate outputs for commercial or malicious purposes.

What this research license achieves is that we cannot use this model in applications we publish.

Companies can use llm to license-wash open source code regardless of license.

How difficult would it be to use this model to create a second model without licensing issues?

Why would you even do that? Just... use it? There hasn't been any legal precedent on if models can even be copyright restricted. Labs just keep publishing license documents as if they matter.

Well, it is an indication that it matters to the lab, so if you don't want legal fees to be the first one to set precedent, then it does matter a great deal.

You could say the same thing about "license-washing" the model. It seems like you're just going through a guaranteed expensive process to have roughly the same risk as just using the model and potentially getting hit with legal fees.

What.

No one really cares about licenses, especially now. Just use it, the odds of consequences are unfathomably low.

I have seen comments on X that they will consider a revenue cap for the non-commercial restriction.

A researcher commented among the lines that they have no interest in restricting creators from using it for monetized YT content.

The way he put it, it suggested they are at this time looking to understand use cases rather than necessarily limit or charge for commercial use, and he recommended reaching out to the commercial team.

So it sounds like one could likely receive a free commercial license if needed.

What are the top image models that still use a less restrictive license today?

Boogu-Image has the Apache 2.0 License [1] (good coherence, but outputs can look synthetic).

And Krea 2 has a community license [2] that is fairly permissive - I think commercial usage is allowed under $1 million.

Boogu-Image scored 6/15 and Krea 2 scored 7/15 on my GenAI Showdown benchmark [3] - only Ideogram4 eclipses them in terms of local models, but its got a far more restrictive license and the JSON structured inputs can be a pain to work with.

[1] - https://github.com/Boogu-Project/Boogu-Image

[2] - https://www.krea.ai/krea-2-licensing

[3] - https://genai-showdown.specr.net/?models=fd,hd,kd,qi,f2d,zt,...

Tune the weights a bit and call them derivative work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com