Termination of the release

User Notice
Termination of the OpenVSLAM release
Effective starting: February 25, 2021

The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology would like to inform you about the termination of the open source software for Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (OpenVSLAM), that was released online for the public.

The OpenVSLAM software was released with the 2-clause BSD licensed source codes in May 2019. Since the release, a number of users found many opportunities to experience OpenVSLAM.

Currently, some internal concerns are being raised regarding similarities in the source codes between OpenVSLAM and another simultaneous localization and mapping software, ORB-SLAM2, that was released under the GPLv3 license terms. These similarities could potentially be in violation of the copyright of ORB-SLAM2.

In response to these concerns, we have closely inspected the OpenVSLAM code and found no evidence of precisely identical copies of ORB-SLAM2 source code in OpenVSLAM. We acknowledge that certain similarities would occur due to the underlying algorithms and processes of coding that were referred to in the program. Although, we did not observe any potential copyright infringement incidences, in order to avoid any risk of possible copyright issues and as part of our due diligence, we made the difficult decision to terminate the release of OpenVSLAM.

For those users who have already downloaded OpenVSLAM prior to the termination of release, please be aware that you are responsible for all actions that are performed on or related to OpenVSLAM, including any works through the end usage. If you are considering and using the downloaded OpenVSLAM as a derivative work based on ORB-SLAM2 under the GPLv3 license, there may be no issues on this matter.

For further information, please contact: M-openvslam-q-ml@aist.go.jp

Artificial Intelligence Research Center
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)