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

[McCoy Smith]

This seems to me to be primarily a criticism of the manner in which this 
particular licensor has expressed the license or licenses for the 
materials that they have posted. I'm not sure I understand how this 
particular situation is an implication of the license text itself.

Most of the frequently-used software open source licenses are fairly 
generic in defining in the license text what is licensed (for example, 
GPLv3: "any copyrightable work licensed under this License"; Apache-2.0: 
"the work of authorship, whether in Source or Object form, made 
available under the License"). This license is (possibly?) more detailed 
in expressing what materials to which it applies, although still uses 
the generic format of predecessor licenses: "the materials provided 
to you under this agreement, consisting of [followed by an articulation 
of machine learning models and related artifacts]".

I understand the argument that perhaps by attaching this license to two 
arguably different types of things (a model, and "artifacts" which may 
include data, documentation or software), the termination provision 
could terminate rights to one when the infringement is the other, and 
that some here believe that might be overbroad or discriminatory, but 
I'm not sure I get how the articulation of the works that are licensed 
in this license text is itself problematic.

I will note that the ModelGo licenses (also directed to AI models) that 
were submitted and are currently up for consideration articulate the 
licensed materials in this way too:

https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/ModelGo/blob/main/MGL/V2/MG0/LICENSE 
(""Licensed Materials" means the Model and Complementary Materials that 
are Distributed by the Licensor under this License. ")

https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/ModelGo/blob/main/MGL/V2/MG-BY/LICENSE 
(""Licensed Materials" means the Model and Complementary Materials that 
are Distributed by the Licensor under this License.")

So I'd like to hear if a similar concern about that definition is a 
problem for those licenses as well. And if not, why not.

On 8/29/2026 4:54 PM, Richard Fontana via License-review wrote:
> 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
>
>
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