Is Alibaba moving Away from Permissive OSS with models like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next?

I’m not sure if we’re getting any qwen 4 models soon but I’m a little concerned that if we do they’ll be licensed like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next.

While that license was 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.

So internal R&D looks fine; customer-facing AI services are where you’d want clarification. Also output ownership needs to clearly covered in the license, that wasn’t the case when I last checked.