For the past two years, enterprises evaluating open-weight models have faced an awkward trade-off. Google’s Gemma line consistently delivered strong performance, but its custom license — with usage restrictions and terms Google could update at will — pushed many teams toward Mistral or Alibaba’s Qwen instead. Legal review added friction. Compliance teams flagged edge cases. And capable as Gemma 3 was, “open” with asterisks isn’t the same as open.Gemma 4 eliminates that friction entirely. Google DeepMind’s newest open model family ships under a standard Apache 2.0 license — the same permissive terms used by Qwen, Mistral, Arcee, and most of the open-weight ecosystem. No custom clauses, no “Harmful Use” carve-outs that required legal interpretation, no restrictions on redistribution or commercial deployment. For enterprise teams that had been waiting for Google to play on the same licensing terms as the rest of the field, the wait is over.The timing is notable. As some Chinese AI labs (most notably Alibaba’s latest Qwen models, Qwen3.5 Omni and Qwen 3.6 Plus) have begun pulling back from fully open releases for their latest models, Google is moving in the opposite direction — opening up its most capable Gemma release yet while explicitly stating the architecture draws from its commercial Gemini 3 research.Four models, two tiers: Edge to workstation in a single familyGemma 4 arrives as four distinct models organized into two deployment tiers. The “workstation” tier includes a 31B-parameter dense model and a 26B A4B Mixture-of-Experts model — both supporting text and image input with 256K-token context windows. The “edge” tier consists of the E2B and E4B, compact models designed for phones, embedded devices, and laptops, supporting …
