[License-discuss] License approval question

[Kevin P. Fleming]

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).
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