I have seen a launch stall because of a license nobody read. Not fun. The license check feels like paperwork, so it gets deferred, and then it is an emergency. Do not be that launch.
Simplified picture. Permissive licenses, Apache 2.0, MIT, let you build commercial products with minimal obligations. Green lights. Community licenses, like the ones on Meta's Llama family, add conditions: user thresholds, acceptable-use restrictions, attribution. Yellow lights. Fine if you read them, dangerous if you do not. Research-only is a red light for products. Full stop. Yellow lights are fine to drive through, as long as you saw them coming.
The traps live in the details. A license can be permissive for the weights but restrictive about the model name. Thresholds can trigger obligations at a scale you do not have yet but plan for. Fine-tunes can inherit the base model's license, so your custom work does not escape the original terms. Ask me which of these has bitten someone I know. All of them.
Check the license at shortlist time, not launch time. Ten minutes. Cheapest risk reduction in the whole project. Ten minutes now beats ten weeks of rework later. I am not exaggerating the ratio by much.
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