[License-review] For Approval: OpenMDW License Agreement, versions 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1)

[Richard Fontana]

Here's an example of a "Model Materials" problem I found in an
OpenMDW-1.1 repository/model release (this was the second one I looked
at when filtering by license in the Hugging Face landing page):
NVIDIA has released this:
https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Parse-2.0
Regarding licensing, the repo README says:
"This model and its associated configuration files are licensed under
the OpenMDW License Agreement, version 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1). Use of the
tokenizer included in this model is governed by the CC-BY-4.0 license.
This project will download and install additional third-party open
source software projects. Review the license terms of these open
source projects before use."

So already there is something unclear because if you look at the
repository, it includes stuff besides what I think this text means by
"model and its associated configuration files", but we don't really
know. That's not an indictment of the license itself. But I took a
look at what is in this repository and my attention immediately fell
on this file: https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Parse-2.0/blob/main/latex2html.py
[Aside: I assume this has nothing to do with a widely used
LaTeX-to-HTML script from decades ago that I mainly remember as being
under some non-FOSS license]

This is a Python script of several hundred lines. There is no
copyright or license notice. It seems to have been developed at least
in part by an NVIDIA employee.
This file has *nothing* in particular to do with
NVIDIA-Nemotrol-Parse-2.0 as far as I can tell. There is nothing in
this file that relates to AI, machine learning, models, weights,
neural network architectures, or the like.

What is its license? I think we have to assume it's under OpenMDW-1.1.
The LICENSE file contains the text of OpenMDW-1.1 and says at the top:
"All binary model files and source code files are licensed under the
OpenMDW-1.1 License." latex2html.py is clearly a source code file.

So it must be in some sense part of some "Model Materials". But is it
the unit of "Model Materials" that encompasses (presumably) most of
the rest of the repository? ""Model Materials" means the materials
provided to
you under this agreement, consisting of: (1) one or more machine learning
models (including architecture and parameters); and (2) all related artifacts
(including associated data, documentation and software) that are provided to
you hereunder."
I don't know if this latex2html script is a "related artifact" with
respect to the rest of the Nemotron-Parse-2.0 release. That would be
at least the naive conclusion. If it's *not*, then we have at least
two instances of "Model Materials" in this repository, with presumably
the latex2html.py script being its own "Model Materials" and not quite
fitting the definition of Model Materials well.

So maybe we are better off assuming that there is one instance of
"Model Materials" and latex2html.py is part of it. But if that's true,
then we have to think about the impact of the copyright and patent
defensive termination provision as it relates to everything (under
OpenMDW-1.1) in this repository.

This script has, in a technical sense, nothing to do with
Nemotron-Parse-2.0 or any other model. It's apparently a script having
some general utility in parsing LaTeX tables and converting them to
HTML and other formats. So suppose I bring a copyright claim accusing
the model as such of infringement. Is it fair that NVIDIA can
terminate my license to use this general-purpose LaTeX table
conversion tool, which I might well be using in some context far
removed from anything to do with AI, let alone this particular model?
Or, let's imagine that this is based on the original LaTeX2HTML script
from ancient times and the copyright holder sues NVIDIA for breaching
the license. The copyright holder happens to be using the
Nemotron-Parse-2.0 model for purposes having no connection to the
latex2html.py script. Is it fair for NVIDIA to be able to terminate
that person's license to the model proper because they brought a
copyright lawsuit having to do with a technically unrelated code file?
This is what I mean when I say there may be an OSD 9 problem with this
license. "The license must not place restrictions on other software
that is distributed along with the licensed software." OpenMDW-1.1, in
this repository, as it applies to some of what's in this repository,
is placing restrictions on one discrete thing that is *also* under
OpenMDW-1.1 but which seems to be "other software . . . distributed
along with" that stuff. The separateness, as I said in an earlier
comment, is masked in a sense by the fact that the same license is
used for everything - as I keep saying, this is the whole purpose of
OpenMDW.

I suspect this is not an atypical sort of example.

Richard