What Apache 2.0 did for Gemma 4 is not primarily a legal story — it is an architectural one. By releasing four multimodal models built from Gemini 3 research under a license that allows commercial fine-tuning without royalty negotiations, Google removed the friction point that had kept earlier open-weights models confined to research contexts. The immediate appearance of tool-calling implementation guides signals that practitioners treated the license as infrastructure — the foundation on which to build, not a position to debate. Kronos is the cleaner proof: a specialized financial forecasting…