Operate
Licensing
Choose a license that matches the rights you intend to grant — to individuals, to teams, and to commercial users.
Open-source licenses
Node Data accepts every OSI-approved license out of the box. The most common choices for assets in robotics and applied ML:
| License | Commercial use | Modifications | Patent grant | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MIT | Yes | Yes | Implicit | Most permissive; cite required. |
| Apache-2.0 | Yes | Yes | Explicit | Recommended for models you want broadly adopted. |
| BSD-3-Clause | Yes | Yes | None | Includes non-endorsement clause. |
| CC-BY-4.0 | Yes | Yes | None | Common for datasets. Attribution required. |
| CC-BY-SA-4.0 | Yes | Yes (share-alike) | None | Derivatives must use the same license. |
| CC-BY-NC-4.0 | No | Yes | None | Research-only datasets. |
Commercial licenses
For paid assets we offer two pre-baked commercial templates. Both are machine-readable and surface their permissions on the listing page.
- ND Commercial — Single Seat — one named user, unlimited use, no redistribution. Best for individual buyers.
- ND Commercial — Team — up to N named seats per the listing terms, internal use only. Best for companies.
Custom licenses
Bring your own license text on Enterprise plans. Custom licenses are reviewed by the Node Data legal team and rendered alongside the machine-readable permissions for clarity. Buyers must explicitly acknowledge a custom license before checkout completes.
License is per asset, not per account
Downstream rights
When you publish a model trained on a dataset hosted on Node Data, the dataset's license travels with the model. The validator flags common conflicts:
- Training on a CC-BY-NC dataset and shipping the model commercially
- Training on a copyleft dataset (CC-BY-SA) without share-alike
- Mixing GPL-licensed code into an MIT-licensed asset
Enforcement
License grants are recorded on-chain (write-only audit log) and included with every download. Disputes go through the support flow at /enterprise.