{"id":"BigScience-BLOOM-RAIL-1.0","title":"BigScience RAIL License v1.0","reviewed_on":"2026-09-22","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://scancode-licensedb.aboutcode.org/bigscience-rail-1.0.LICENSE","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The first licence of the responsible-use family, written for one released model and dated May 19, 2022. It grants the copyright and patent rights of a permissive licence and takes back thirteen uses in an attachment, which every downstream agreement must carry as an enforceable provision. The record is modelled identically to the general template of the family, from which it differs only in the preamble, in the definition of the training data and in two extra items of the attachment.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"dct:title","description":"File name, record identifier and IRI local name agree. The licence has no SPDX identifier, so no spdx:licenseId triple is written. dct:title is the name the document gives itself; the short forms and the model-hub tag are in dct:alternative.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:target","description":"dcmitype:Dataset and dcmitype:Software. The licensed material is the model itself, \"any accompanying machine-learning based assemblies (including checkpoints), consisting of learnt weights, parameters (including optimizer states)\", which is data, together with the Complementary Material, \"the accompanying source code and scripts used to define, run, load, benchmark or evaluate the Model\", which is software. The training data is defined as \"a collection of texts extracted from the BigScience Corpus\" and is expressly not licensed.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The copyright grant reads \"each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Complementary Material, the Model, and Derivatives of the Model.\" That gives odrl:reproduce, odrl:display, odrl:present, odrl:distribute, dalicc:sublicense, cc:DerivativeWorks and dalicc:ModifiedWorks, and odrl:modify and odrl:derive for the changes the licence calls Derivatives of the Model. dalicc:patentGrant comes from the separate patent licence. cc:CommercialUse is permitted because the licence names no limit of purpose: the licensee is defined as a person \"making use of the Model for whichever purpose and in any field of use\", and the only limits are the restricted uses of the attachment. dalicc:useForModelTraining is permitted because paragraph 5 says in terms that \"Use may include creating any content with, finetuning, updating, running, training, evaluating and/or reparametrizing the Model\", and because a model trained from this one by distillation or on synthetic data is a Derivative of the Model, which the grant licenses. dalicc:networkUseTrigger carries the hosting limb of Distribution, \"You may host for Third Party remote access purposes (e.g. software-as-a-service), reproduce and distribute copies of the Model or Derivatives of the Model thereof in any medium\", and it carries the same notice duties, because the licence treats hosting as a form of it. dalicc:ChangeLicense is permitted and carries dalicc:compliantLicense; see rubric 10.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"Three prohibitions. dalicc:promote from the trademark clause, \"Nothing in this License permits You to make use of Licensors' trademarks, trade names, logos or to otherwise suggest endorsement or misrepresent the relationship between the parties; and any rights not expressly granted herein are reserved by the Licensors.\" dalicc:patentRetaliationTermination from the patent clause, under which patent litigation over the model ends the patent licence. dalicc:exemptedMaterial from the definition that carves the training data out of the grant: \"The Data is not licensed under this License.\"","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"Four duties on each of odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive, and three of them again on dalicc:networkUseTrigger. cc:Notice comes from \"You must give any Third Party recipients of the Model or Derivatives of the Model a copy of this License\"; cc:Attribution from \"You must retain all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices\"; dalicc:modificationNotice from \"You must cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed the files\"; and dalicc:addStatement from the duty to \"give notice to subsequent users You Distribute to, that the Model or Derivatives of the Model are subject to paragraph 5\". The modification notice does not hang on the hosting trigger, because hosting ships no files.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"The disclaimer clause goes to dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer, the limitation clause to dalicc:LiabilityLimitation and the clause that lets a redistributor offer and charge for a warranty to dalicc:WarrantyOrLiabilityAcceptance, each whole and verbatim. dalicc:additionalClauses carries the definitions, the sentence that makes the model subject to the conditions of section III, the copyright grant, the patent grant, the distribution conditions, the use-based restrictions clause, the output clause, the runtime clause, the trademark clause, the severability clause and the whole of the attachment. Curly quotation marks in the source are kept; no long dash appears in the text.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"minor","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual, both from the grant, which is \"perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable\". The licence names no governing law and no court, so dalicc:governingLaw is left out. It has no general termination clause either, so dalicc:terminatesOnBreach is left out: the only ending the text provides is the patent clause, which is modelled as a prohibition. dalicc:licenseVersion is \"1.0\", the number in the heading of the document.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The condition that carries the restrictions downstream has no term: \"Use-based restrictions as referenced in paragraph 5 MUST be included as an enforceable provision by You in any type of legal agreement (e.g. a license) governing the use and/or distribution of the Model or Derivatives of the Model, and You shall give notice to subsequent users You Distribute to, that the Model or Derivatives of the Model are subject to paragraph 5.\" dalicc:addStatement covers the notice half of it, the duty to tell subsequent users that the model is subject to the restrictions, but not the half that obliges the licensee to write the restrictions into its own agreement as an enforceable provision. Quoted; the proposed term is dalicc:passThroughUseRestrictions, a duty action.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:fieldOfUseRestriction","description":"The attachment lists thirteen uses the licensee agrees not to make of the model. dalicc:fieldOfUseRestriction takes a short literal naming the field, not a list, so the literal names the field and the whole attachment is quoted verbatim in dalicc:additionalClauses. The proposed term is dalicc:prohibitedUsePolicy, an annotation carrying the list or the policy a licence applies.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The output clause has no term: \"Except as set forth herein, Licensor claims no rights in the Output You generate using the Model. You are accountable for the Output you generate and its subsequent uses. No use of the output can contravene any provision as stated in the License.\" It is neither a permission nor a duty but a statement about what the licensor does not claim, and the composer has nowhere to put it. Quoted; the proposed term is dalicc:outputRightsStatement, an annotation.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The runtime clause reserves a power rather than granting or withholding a right: \"To the maximum extent permitted by law, Licensor reserves the right to restrict (remotely or otherwise) usage of the Model in violation of this License, update the Model through electronic means, or modify the Output of the Model based on updates. You shall undertake reasonable efforts to use the latest version of the Model.\" Quoted; the proposed term is dalicc:runtimeRestrictionReserved, an annotation for a licence whose licensor may switch off a non-compliant use.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check of app.services.composer against dg_default returned an empty conflict list. The licence-wide position holds no share-alike duty, so the dalicc:ChangeLicense permission raises no conflict; it carries dalicc:compliantLicense all the same, because the replacement terms must keep the restrictions.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"Family: the oldest of the four texts that share this section layout. Against the general template it adds two items to the attachment, one requiring a machine-generated disclaimer and one barring impersonation, and it names the training corpus. Nothing in the deontic model changes: the two records carry the same permissions, prohibitions and duties in the same places.","action":"none"}],"family":"Model licences","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"variant_of":null,"notes":"The space the evidence names holds only a configuration file, so the text was taken from the plain-text copy in the ScanCode license database; cc:legalcode points there and dct:source at the space that publishes the licence. dct:title is the heading of the document, \"BigScience RAIL License v1.0\"; the name under which the licence is declared on model hubs is in dct:alternative."}