Safeguard's open source licenses comparison lines up MIT, Apache, GPL and the rest. On software, the classic three dominate. On AI models, our earlier count of the classics found them on 116 of our 200 models. This page counts the rest: the 84 models whose licenses are none of the three.
The rest, by family
| License family in the rest | Models |
|---|---|
| Llama community licenses (2, 3.1, 3.2 and later, all name variants) | 23 |
| Gemma Terms of Use | 14 |
| DeepSeek license agreements | 10 |
| NVIDIA open model licenses | 5 |
| Qwen license agreement | 3 |
| BigScience RAIL | 2 |
| 27 further licenses, 1 model each | 27 |
Two facts stand out. First, GPL appears zero times in the dataset: the copyleft giant of software licensing is simply absent from open model releases, which is why the classic comparison needs a model-specific sequel. Second, the rest is not a tail of trivia. Its two biggest families, Llama (23 models) and Gemma (14), are among the most downloaded open models in the world, and their licenses are custom documents with their own thresholds and acceptable-use lists, not variants of MIT or Apache.
The sharpest difference is fine print. 83 of the 84 rest models carry restriction text in our records: acceptable-use lists, thresholds, or conditions on derivatives. Only 6 of the 116 classic-license models carry any. A custom license is nearly always a license with conditions attached, and the conditions are the part a comparison table of MIT, Apache and GPL never shows.
What to do with the rest
Treat every custom license as its own document. The checks that matter are the ones the classic comparison cannot make for you: the commercial flag (192 of the 200 allow it, and all 8 of the models that bar it sit in the rest), the user thresholds, and the restriction text. Our ShipSafe Filter holds the per-model records, and the full license census lists all 50 names.
Sources: Safeguard, Open Source Licenses Comparison: MIT vs Apache vs GPL and the Rest; this site's license records for 200 open models (collected September 2025). License summaries are orientation, not legal advice.