Maximilian: So now with that,
we're almost ready to get started
downloading and running models on our system.
But before we do that
and before we take a closer look
at the hardware requirements you have to meet,
it's important to talk about licenses
because I mentioned earlier
that when using open Large Language Models,
when running them locally,
especially when using them commercially though,
you must make sure that you respect the license
of the creator, of the provider
of that Large Language Model.
So the license created by Google for their Gemma models
or Meta for their Llama models, for example.
And you can find out
which license applies to a certain model,
for example, on Hugging Face,
by going to the model card
of the model you are interested in.
And there at the top,
you'll typically find this license badge here,
which tells you which license applies to this model.
In this case, for this Gemma-3 model,
I opened as an example here,
it's the Gemma license.
And you can then click on this batch
to view the underlying license file,
which in this case leads us to Google's page here
where you can go through that license
to understand how you may and may not use this model.
And of course there are many different licenses out there,
but amongst the most important ones to be aware of
are, for example, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses,
which would be very permissive licenses.
And for example, DeepSeek-R1 would be one open model
that does use the MIT license.
Now, the MIT license like the Apache 2.0 license
is very permissive.
Commercial use is no problem there.
You just may need to provide some attribution
or extra information to the users of your service.
Now, many open models however,
do not use such permissive licenses.
For example, another important license to be aware of
is Meta's Llama license.
This is a somewhat permissive license.
It does allow you to run Llama on your system,
on your servers,
and it does allow commercial use,
but with certain limitations.
For example, for this Llama 4 license,
when commercially using this model,
if you have more than 700 million
monthly active users,
at the point of time where this model version is released,
if I read this correctly,
you must request an extra license from Meta,
which they of course may or may not grant you,
and for which they of course may or may not charge money.
In addition, attribution is required
and certain kinds of use are prohibited.
Illegal use, for example,
but maybe also some other scenarios.
So you definitely need to check the license agreements
to find out how you may and may not use the Llama models.
The same is true for the Gemma models.
Google has their own license,
which is also somewhat permissive,
which does allow private and commercial use,
and which has no limitations like Meta,
at least at the point of time where I'm recording this.
You don't need to get a different license
once you have a certain amount of users,
but there still are special requirements
regarding attribution, for example,
or that certain use cases are prohibited.
In general, whenever using an open model,
especially when using it commercially,
of course you should check the terms
and the license of that model
to find out whether you may use the model
the way you want to.
In general, those open models
do have quite permissive licenses,
but as explained here,
you should definitely take a closer look,
especially once you plan
to use these open models commercially.