Glossary
MAU
A user-count metric used in restrictive open-weights licenses (notably Llama's Community License) to trigger a requirement to negotiate a separate commercial license at scale.
The lever Meta uses to keep the LlamaweightsMeta's open-weight model family, the most widely deployed open release through 2024 to 2026, released under the source-available Community License with an MAU cap and acceptable-use clause. Open full entry license restrictive without calling it proprietary. The license grants broad use and modification of the weights, but if the licensee’s product reaches 700 million monthly active users, they must request a separate commercial license from Meta. The threshold is high enough that almost no team will hit it, but it is a license-level chokepoint that Apache 2.0governanceA permissive open-source license used by most open-weight model releases (Llama from 4 onward partial, Qwen, Mistral, DeepSeek, Falcon), allowing commercial use without acceptable-use restrictions. Open full entry does not have.
The mechanism matters because OSAIDgovernanceThe OSI's October 2024 definition of "open source AI," requiring not just weights but enough information about data, code, and architecture for third parties to reproduce the system. Open full entry and the OSIgovernanceThe nonprofit that maintains the canonical Open Source Definition for software since 1998, and the OSAID definition for AI as of 2024. Open full entry both reject MAU clauses as incompatible with the Open Source Definition: a license that discriminates against a class of users (in this case, very large ones) is not free software in the canonical sense. So LlamaweightsMeta's open-weight model family, the most widely deployed open release through 2024 to 2026, released under the source-available Community License with an MAU cap and acceptable-use clause. Open full entry with its 700M MAU clause is “source-availableweightsA license category that lets users read and modify the code or weights but imposes restrictions (use limits, non-compete, MAU thresholds) that exclude it from the strict open-source definition. Open full entry ” or “open weightsweightsA model release that publishes the trained parameters under some downloadable license, distinct from "open source" which (per OSAID) also requires data and training-code openness. Open full entry ,” not “open source” by the strict definition.
The 700M number is conspicuously sized to exclude exactly Meta’s direct competitors (Google, Microsoft, ByteDance, Apple) while permitting essentially the whole rest of the market.