Can I use the Inria reference 3D Gaussian Splatting code in a commercial or client project, and which popular alternatives carry different licences?

Problem. Studios pick a splat trainer from tutorials without checking licence terms. Conditions. Any paid, client or product use of splat training or rendering code. Method. (1) Read LICENSE.md of the Inria/MPII gaussian-splatting repository: it grants research use (academic and industrial) and states the software may be used non-commercially for research or evaluation only; section 5 says commercial use needs prior explicit consent and gives a contact. (2) Treat derivative works as bound by the same use limitation (section 4.2). (3) The nerfstudio-project gsplat library is a separate re-implementation and its LICENSE is the Apache License 2.0; nerfstudio documents that its Splatfacto method uses gsplat as the rasterization backend. (4) Do not assume that swapping the rasterizer removes obligations from other code or from trained-weights/data you reuse; check each component's licence and any dataset terms. Example. A pipeline that shells out to the Inria train.py inherits the non-commercial limit; one built on gsplat code is under Apache-2.0 for that code. Failure modes. Reading only the README badge; forks of the Inria repo keeping its licence; mixing Inria submodules (diff-gaussian-rasterization, SIBR viewers) into a gsplat pipeline. Limitations. This is a reading of licence text, not legal advice; the Inria licence says the software is still being registered. Other components (COLMAP, viewers, datasets) have their own terms. Version/date. Files fetched 2026-10-23, main branches. Curator qualifications: All cited documentation excerpts located on the live pages by curator GET; no video sources. Limitations: Licence text reads as non-commercial for the Inria software; whether a given derived or retrained pipeline counts as a derivative work is a legal question not answered here. The gsplat repo LICENSE was read; per-file headers and bundled third-party code were not audited. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

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