Can this be used commercially?

[juangea]

Can this be used commercially?
That's the question, thanks!

[bitplane]

This is likely a tough question. The LICENSE says you can, but it does not have patent waivers. So it'll ultimately depend on whether Microsoft filed any patents and whether they cover your product's use cases.

[juangea]

Maybe @sicxu , @YuDeng or @JeffreyXiang can confirm this can be used commercially.

But thanks for the input @bitplane :)

[YuDeng]

Hi @juangea, our pretrained models and most of our code are available under the MIT license, which permits commercial use with the only requirements being the preservation of copyright and license notices. However, the components related to rendering—such as rendering 3D Gaussians, Radiance fields, and extracting meshes and GLBs—are not available for commercial use. You will need to rewrite these parts if you intend to use them commercially. For more details, please refer to our license information at this link.

[juangea]

Thanks @YuDeng

It seems FlexiCubes is now part of Kaolin (The core functions of FlexiCubes are now in Kaolin starting from v0.15.0) so maybe that's an alternative, (it's under Apache 2.0)

I'm not sure what could be a good alternative to Differential Gaussian Rasterization.

In any case, since I'm not a low level programmer, this may be out of my capabilities, but I want to explore the possibilities, those libraries are used as a postproduction of the model output?

In what phases or what order are these libraries used?

I mean, if we use the model, we could investigate a different way of rendering the gaussian splatting or the glb extraction, but I'm not entirely sure what the output if the model is.

Cna you clarify this for me please?

No need for super long explanation, I don't want to steal too much time from you, just the basics to understand what are talking about here.

Thanks a lot!

[YuDeng]

The direct outputs of our models are: Gaussian primitives, local radiance fields within active voxels, or local signed distance values and parameters for Flexicubes to extract mesh surfaces. Up to these parts, everything follows the MIT license. After that, for rendering Gaussians, radiance fields, and extracting meshes, they are under different licenses and should be replaced.

[jclarkk]

@juangea

Even in kaolin it's stated that this part is non commercial:

[juangea]

LOL good to know.

A different approach will have to be taken then, it’s not going to be easy I presume.

[jclarkk]

@juangea
I do have some good news though, I managed to implement the renderer using gsplat which has a permissive license.

@YuDeng
Would you like a PR on this?

[YuDeng]

Hi @jclarkk, thanks for that. You can go ahead to make the PR or share the link of your fork here.

For now, I think it's better to keep this repo as is as a verified research project. We'll look into gsplat and evaluate its performance later (for both inference and training).

[DiamondGlassDrill]

@jcclark would love to get to know more about your fork and gsplat. Thanks in advance

[jclarkk]

I've opened a PR here:

#73

[tommi-pirttiniemi]

What about license of the output 3d models?

[YuDeng]

Hi @tommi-pirttiniemi, when exporting GLB files, the process involves using Flexicubes to extract meshes and a non-commercial Gaussian renderer for baking the albedos. It also involves using pymeshfix for mesh post-processing, which is under a GPL-3.0 license and allows for commercial use.

As suggested by @jclarkk in #73, gsplat can be an alternative to the Gaussian renderer; however, replacing the Flexicubes part requires further effort.

[jclarkk]

@juangea @YuDeng
I've also implemented Marching Cubes as a replacement for FlexiCubes. You can view the PR here:
#89