Reading a robot SDK licence before you build on it

A robot manufacturer publishing code on GitHub answers one question and leaves a more important one unanswered: what a licence file actually permits is a separate question from whether one exists at all, and the two do not track each other the way a buyer might assume.

AimRT, the X2 robot descriptions and the OmniHand SDK are published under Mulan PSL v2, a permissive licence that is commercially usable.

That covers the middleware, the X2's robot description files, and the OmniHand SDK across the OmniHand 2025, the Pro 2025, the 3 Lite and the Dex UMI, with C++, Python, kinematics and ROS 2 APIs. A product built on any of these can be sold, and the licence is not the blocker.

The D1 Edu-Ultra resources carry BSD-3-Clause, permissive enough for a university group to build and publish on, and equally usable in a commercial product.

Two different permissive licences across one manufacturer's repositories is not a problem in itself, but it means checking the specific repository rather than assuming one licence covers the whole catalogue.

The D1 Max SDK repository ships with no licence file at all, which by default reserves all rights rather than granting any.

No licence file is not a gap to read past; it is the strictest possible answer, and building on that repository without a separate agreement is building on code the manufacturer has not granted permission to use.

The world-model and dataset work is CC BY-NC-SA, meaning non-commercial: Genie Envisioner, EnerVerse-AC, EWMBench, the AgiBot World datasets and the GO-1 weights all carry it.

Useful for research, and unusable in a shipped product without a separate agreement, regardless of how permissive the SDK licence on the hardware side happens to be.

Four repositories, three licence postures, and none of them can be inferred from the others. The only reliable check is the repository itself, read before committing engineering time to the component your project actually needs, not the manufacturer's marketing page and not an assumption carried over from a different part of the catalogue.