I have seen a launch stall on a license nobody read. Ten minutes at shortlist time beats ten weeks of rework later. Cheapest risk reduction in the whole project. - Apache 2.0, MIT: green lights for commercial products. - Community licenses like Llama's: yellow lights. Usable, with conditions you need to read. Fine if you saw them coming. - Research-only: red light for products. Full stop. - Fine-tunes inherit the base model's license. Your custom work does not escape the original terms. - Thresholds can trigger obligations at a scale you do not have yet but plan for. PrivateLLM deploy handles the whole thing: private LLM on AWS, $50 setup plus usage, licensed models kept on your own servers.