Re: License approval question

On Thu, Feb 6, 2025, at 14:48, Tiffany Cappellari wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> My team at the Robotics and AI Institute want to upstream our opensource Spot ROS 2 driver <https://github.com/bdaiinstitute/spot_ros2> to the ROS 2 buildfarm; however, this involves also upstreaming Boston Dynamic's Spot SDK. We have permission from BD to do so, but they have a custom license that is not approved by the OSRF. We reached out to OSRF to ask for an exception and were directed to submit the license for approval by OSI.
> 
> Looking at the review process and requirements, we are concerned that BD's license won't fulfill OSD 2, 8, and 10. Simply put, the license is a modified version of the MIT license to prevent anyone copying BD's robots. I've attached a copy of the license for reference.

IANAL, just a contributor here, but I suspect you are right.

2(c) is a clear OSD 6 violation, as it restricts usage of the software to a list of permitted uses (you suspected it was a violation of OSD 8, but it's OSD 6).

I don't see anything which would violate OSD 2, as the license permits distribution in source code form.

2(f) seems like it might be an OSD 10 violation, but I don't think it is as it doesn't really seem to be necessary in the license at all (it's a possible requirement for installation of the software onto a specific BD product).

_______________________________________________
The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Official statements by the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.

License-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org