Qwen's open-source pledge is a screenshot, not an announcement

On 2 November the top post on r/LocalLLaMA was an image, not a link: a screenshot headed "Official Statement: Qwen Models Will Stick to Open Source to the End!" It drew roughly 4,500 points and about 480 comments. No official Qwen page carrying it could be found, so every claim here rests on the poster's own translation.

What the screenshot says

It names the rumour it means to kill: "There were some rumours the last few days that Qwen4 will be the last open-weight series of Qwen, and future ones would be API only." It attributes to Qwen head Liu Dayiheng the line that "Future Qwen 4.0 and Qwen 5.0 Will Continue to Be Open Source", an argument that AI's value "should not belong only to a few people", and three figures: more than 3 billion cumulative downloads, over 460 open-source models released, and more than 300,000 derivative models.

The rumour had better sourcing than the denial

Alibaba Cloud's recap of the September Apsara conference, published on 24 September, says Qwen 4 is in training and sets out a roadmap for Qwen 4.5 and Qwen 5 "projected to scale up to 5 to 10 trillion parameters". It never mentions an open-source commitment. Scale and openness pull against each other: a generation that size is where publishing weights stops being a download and becomes a capex decision.

The tooling points at it too. A Qwen Code commit on 28 October added a rule sizing any model id beginning "qwen4" at a 1,000,000-token context window, calling 1M "the forward default for the qwen4 generation".

The statement is older than the post

The wording is older than the thread. 36kr's report from Liu's first keynote as Qwen head, at the Yunqi conference on 22 September, carries the same AI-for-all sentence and the same three figures, and says he told the audience Qwen would keep adhering to open source. The screenshot carries no date or venue, and much of the comment thread argued about Chinese politics rather than licences. That is the shape of the artifact: a six-week-old stage line recirculated as breaking news, with no vendor post behind it.

What the pledge does not cover

Qwen's releases are not uniform. Several ship under non-commercial research terms rather than Apache-2.0, so a promise to stay open does not say which licence Qwen 4 arrives under, or whether the largest variants follow. No licence changed on 2 November; the commitment is a sentence about releases that do not exist yet.

Liu's roadmap, as 36kr reported it, puts Qwen4-27B first on the open-source side, and a context rule is not weights: we covered that commit separately. The pledge gets settled the day a Qwen 4 repository appears on Hugging Face under a licence that permits commercial use, or the day it does not.