#licensing

Free is not yours: what the robot base-model licences actually say

We checked thirteen robot base-model licences against the weight repositories themselves, and the first page the check corrected was our own — then the second was our own method. Two of the most-cited Chinese releases are barred from commercial use, one is governed by a TODO comment, one publishes weights across four repositories with no licence statement of any kind, and the two highest-profile Western releases each ship documents naming different licences without saying which governs the weights. Of the twenty Hugging Face weight repositories the piece names, two ship a licence file, ten carry a licence tag, and not one carries both. The base layer is a commodity in price and a dependency in law.