verifier.org

Gemma 4

the year's biggest licensing improvement — google dropped its custom terms and shipped this one under real apache 2.0.

free (apache 2.0)#on-device#laptop-class-multimodal-#legally

three generations of custom gemma terms replaced by plain apache 2.0, on a family built to run on hardware you already own — the caveats are housekeeping rather than substance.

gemma 1 through 3 shipped under google's own gemma terms of use: a prohibited-use policy, redistribution and notice obligations, downstream pass-through requirements and termination on breach. widely called 'open', never actually open source. gemma 4's hugging face card carries a plain apache-2.0 tag, and google's announcement says the same. that is a genuine and underreported change.

the family is designed for local deployment: e2b and e4b variants handle text, image and audio on edge hardware, the 12b targets laptops, and the 31b dense and 26b sparse variants sit comfortably on one 24-48gb consumer card when quantised. 256k context and 140+ languages.

the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.

pricing
free (apache 2.0)
our verdict

three generations of custom gemma terms replaced by plain apache 2.0, on a family built to run on hardware you already own — the caveats are housekeeping rather than substance.

we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.

more open-weight llms

Nous Hermes

nous research's fine-tunes, published with open weights

#fine-tunes

AI21 Jamba

hybrid mamba-transformer models with long context, weights released

#long-context#hybrid

Falcon

model family from abu dhabi's technology innovation institute

#research

GLM-5.2

we checked thisfree (mit)

the top-ranked open-weight model on the intelligence index, under plain unmodified mit, with a launch post that tells the truth.

#anyone-who-wants-the-str#needs-the-legal-answer-t