Meta's model licences have carried a monthly active user threshold since the Llama 2 days: cross 700 million monthly active users and you need a separate licence from Meta rather than the standard grant. It gets quoted as proof that open weights are not really open, which is true and almost entirely irrelevant to Australian businesses. The conditions that will affect you are the other ones.
Why the headline restriction does not matter to you
Seven hundred million monthly active users is a scale reached by a handful of companies on earth. No Australian business outside a couple of listed names is within three orders of magnitude of it, and if you get there you will have lawyers on this long before an engineer notices.
Treating it as the reason to avoid a model is a category error. It is a clause aimed squarely at a few named competitors, and it tells you something about the licensor's intent rather than about your risk.
The conditions that actually bind
Restrictions on using outputs to train other models, which matters if you plan to distil something smaller
Attribution and naming requirements that apply to derivative models you release
Acceptable use policies that sit alongside the licence and can be updated separately
Terms that apply differently depending on whether you run the model or resell access to it
The distillation restriction is the one that catches real projects. A business that plans to use a large open-weight model to generate training data for a small internal one may be doing exactly what the licence prohibits, and it is rarely discovered until the work is done.
Open weight is not open source
The two terms are used interchangeably and mean different things. Open source, properly, means no restriction on field of use. Most major model releases carry usage conditions, which puts them outside that definition regardless of how they are marketed.
This is not a moral point, it is a diligence one. If your procurement process or a client contract says "open source", a model under a conditional licence may not qualify, and that is a conversation better had before deployment.
Where it bites for Australian businesses
Two situations, mostly. If you embed a model in a product you sell, the licence travels with the product and your customers inherit its conditions. And if you tender to government or a large enterprise, their vendor questionnaire will ask what licence governs the components in your stack.
Running a model internally for your own processes is the low-risk case. Almost nothing in these licences constrains a business using a model to draft its own documents, and that covers most real usage.
What a licence review actually costs
Far less than people assume. Having a commercial lawyer read the licence and the acceptable use policy against your intended use is typically a $1,500 to $4,000 exercise, and it is a one-off per model.
Set against a build that could need unwinding, or a client contract with an indemnity in it, that is cheap. The businesses that get hurt here are the ones that never asked, not the ones that asked and got an inconvenient answer.
The clause that changes without warning
Acceptable use policies frequently sit outside the licence and can be revised by the licensor. That means the terms governing your deployment may not be static even though the weights on your server are.
If long-term stability is the reason you chose an open-weight model, note that it protects you from behaviour changes rather than from terms changes. Keeping a copy of the licence and policy as at your deployment date is a sensible five-minute habit.
A simple decision rule
Internal use, no redistribution, no training of other models: proceed, keep a copy of the licence, move on. Anything embedded in a product, resold, or used to create another model: get it read properly first.
That rule covers the overwhelming majority of Australian deployments and takes the question off the table without anyone needing to become an expert in model licensing.
What not to conclude
A conditional licence is not a reason to dismiss a model, and it is not a reason to assume you are fine either. It is a document with terms, like any other supplier agreement, and it deserves the same treatment rather than either enthusiasm or alarm.
The wider point is that "free" in this context describes the price, not the freedom. The models are genuinely useful and cost nothing to obtain; what you are accepting in exchange is a set of conditions that most businesses can live with easily and should still know about.
If you are putting an open-weight model into something you sell, book a short call and we will work out which conditions actually apply to you.
