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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 7/2/25 03:48, Tiffany Cappellari
wrote:</div>
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<div>My team at the Robotics and AI Institute want to upstream
our opensource <a
href="https://github.com/bdaiinstitute/spot_ros2"
moz-do-not-send="true">Spot ROS 2 driver</a> to the ROS 2
buildfarm; however, this </div>
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<p>Nice!</p>
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<div>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.<br>
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<p>Ah. Not speaking for OSRF of course, but this referral implies
that they're not willing to distribute software under
non-OSD-compliant licenses, nor maintain it in their build farm,
which would appear to be a deal-breaker for what you're trying to
do.</p>
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<div>Looking at the review process and requirements, we are
concerned that BD's license won't fulfill OSD 2,</div>
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<p>Unless the BD SDK is missing its source code, or it has been
obfuscated, this does not appear to be a problem.<br>
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<div> 8,</div>
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<p>The title is misleading; this clause relates to tied distribution
specifically, which isn't the condition that the license imposes
(N.B. "use with" not "distribution with"; e.g. no breach of the
license is committed by handing someone a copy of the SDK without
also handing them a robot).</p>
<p>The problem is OSD 6 "specific field of endeavor", particularly
term 2(c) "exclusively for use with products offered for sale by
Boston Dynamics", which is an unacceptable condition for
open-source purposes.</p>
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<div> and 10.</div>
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<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Term 2(c) both:</p>
<ul>
<li>excludes a field of endeavour (competing with BD); and</li>
<li>imposes technical discrimination (implicitly that derived
works must retain compatibility with specific BD technology).</li>
</ul>
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<div> Simply put, the license is a modified version of the MIT
license</div>
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<p>Whatever passing resemblance it may once have had with the MIT
license is long gone, it's now an unambiguously
use-discriminatory, non-open-source license.<br>
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<div> to prevent anyone copying BD's robots.</div>
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<p>It's worth noting that a key objective and consequence of
open-source licensing is that covered works are available for
unrestricted use by direct competitors. BD has elected to make its
SDK available under conditions specifically tailored to prevent
this. Unless BD has a change of heart there will be no way to
square this circle: the objectives are diametrically opposed.</p>
<p>(This is neither to fault BD nor open-source licensing, just to
suggest that it appears to be BD's view that their SDK is not a
good candidate for open-source licensing while pursuing their
commercial objectives, and it's quite likely that they're correct.
Who writes the code writes the rules...)<br>
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<p>Taking a step back: it's worth noting that distributing F/OSS
that's dependent upon non-F/OSS is not a new problem. e.g. Both
Debian and Ubuntu have wrestled with it for decades, the former
dropping it almost completely, the latter maintaining separate
"restricted" and "multiverse" repositories to facilitate it:</p>
<ul>
<li>Are there other-open source ROS projects in the same situation
that you're in (dependent upon the BD SDK because they exist to
work with BD hardware)? Is there scope to upstream at least as
far as a combined distribution of all such projects?</li>
<li>OSRF is pretty new, so might reasonably be expected to still
be refining its approach. If there are enough projects in your
situation, maybe it will be willing to maintain a
restricted/non-free subset, or to at least co-operate with
people who do so.</li>
<li>I note in particular in <a
href="https://github.com/osrf/docker_images"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://github.com/osrf/docker_images</a>: </li>
</ul>
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<li><a
href="https://github.com/osrf/docker_images/blob/master/ros2/nightly/nightly-rmw-nonfree"><code>nightly-rmw-nonfree</code></a>
<ul dir="auto">
<li><em>Description:</em>
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<li>builds <code>FROM</code> <code>nightly-rmw</code>
and installs closed source libraries</li>
<li>including non free vendors:
<ul dir="auto">
<li>Connext</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>Notice:</strong>
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<li>includes third party license agreements for non free
software</li>
<li>including the <a
href="https://www.rti.com/products/pricing/compare"
rel="nofollow"><code>Open Community Source</code></a>
license from RTI</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
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which suggests that they've at least thought about this problem,
even if they may not be willing to handle additional exceptions of
this type.<br>
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<p>- Roland</p>
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