LocalLLaMA Still Isn't Convinced After MiniMax Tries to Clarify the M2.7 License

r/LocalLLaMA jumped on this because licensing ambiguity hits open-weight adoption faster than model quality does. The thread reached 208 upvotes and 77 comments after a user linked the MiniMax-M2.7 license update and collected follow-up explanations from MiniMax's Ryan Lee. The reason it spread is simple: people were not trying to decode benchmark charts, they were trying to figure out whether they could build with the model without discovering a legal trap later.

The clarifications shared in the post do move the discussion forward, at least a little. Ryan Lee said personal users are free to run the software on their own servers for coding, applications, agents, tools, integrations, research, and experimentation. He also said building software for personal use and later commercializing that software does not itself require a license. The part MiniMax says it really cares about is companies that offer the model as a public API service. A later update in the thread says individuals can use it however they want for free, while any company or legal entity should reach out to api@minimax.io for a license, with the added note that a license does not automatically mean a fee.

Personal self-hosting and experimentation were described as allowed

MiniMax signaled its main concern is API resale or model-serving businesses

The latest wording still asks any company or legal entity to contact MiniMax

That last point is why the comments stayed skeptical. Several top replies said the new text still reads like a non-commercial license with extra ambiguity layered on top. One popular comment asked the obvious practical question: if making money usually means operating through a company, how useful is a permission that sounds broad for individuals but narrow for legal entities? Others said MiniMax seems to be aiming for a familiar restriction, such as stopping third parties from packaging the model as a paid API, but should have used a more established licensing pattern if that was the goal. The thread was not really hostile to MiniMax for protecting its business. It was frustrated that builders still had to interpret intent from scattered posts instead of a clean document.

The broader signal here is not just about one commit hash. Communities like LocalLLaMA move quickly on new models, but trust breaks when license language changes midstream or reads differently depending on which clarification you saw last. This thread treated the update less as reassurance and more as a reminder that open-weight momentum can stall fast when the legal perimeter is fuzzy.