SEMQ Licensing FAQ

We use two. The SEMQ SDK is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. ARI, our reproducibility benchmark, and the ARI Leaderboard are licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

No. The source code is public, so you can read it, build it and change it, but the license does not allow commercial use. Software licensed this way is usually called "source available." ARI is open source.

The SDK is our product. Most of our engineering goes into it, and licensing it for production use is how we pay for that work. We still wanted people to be able to look at the real code and try it, rather than a cut-down version.

Anything the PolyForm Noncommercial License allows. That includes personal projects, study and research, and use by noncommercial organizations such as universities, charities, public research institutes and government agencies.

We interpret the following activities as noncommercial and allowed under this license:

• evaluating SEMQ, including proofs of concept and pilots, as long as the results are not used in your business operations;
• developing and testing software that works with SEMQ, outside of production;
• running ARI or any other benchmark with the SDK, and publishing the results;
• doing research and publishing the results.

When a company uses the SDK in production, or for any other use not allowed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License. That includes running it on live business data, building it into a product or service, or relying on its output to run a business. If you wish to discuss a commercial license, write to licensing@thesemqgroup.ai.

Yes, as part of an evaluation. You can work with a copy of real data in a test environment. Once the results feed into your actual operations, that is production use and not considered noncommercial.

Yes. You can publish any results you get with the SDK, including comparisons with other products. We do not restrict benchmark publication.

Yes, for any of the uses described above. If you share the SDK or a modified version, include the license and the "Required Notice" line that comes with it.

We have patent applications pending on the SEMQ technology. The PolyForm license includes a patent license only for the uses it allows. If you use the SEMQ technology in violation of the PolyForm Noncommercial license, you may be infringing our patent rights.

Running the ARI benchmark does, because ARI computes its measurements from SEMQ codes. Running ARI and publishing the results is one of the free uses listed above, so anyone can do it at no charge. Checking and scoring existing reports does not need the SDK.

For the SDK, we ask contributors to sign our Contributor License Agreement, which is based on the Apache CLA. You sign it once through CLA Assistant on GitHub. Contributions to ARI and the ARI Leaderboard are accepted under the Apache License 2.0, as section 5 of that license describes.

Our trademark policy explains how to refer to SEMQ and ARI.

Write to licensing@thesemqgroup.ai.