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Spine Evaluation License

License version: 1.0
From: BIG INTELLIGENCE AI, LLC, a Michigan limited liability company ("BIG Intelligence", "we", "us")
To: the person who installs or uses Spine ("you")

In short: Spine is free to evaluate. It is not for production use. Your models stay on your computer, and we cannot see them. You may evaluate Spine on your own designs, including proprietary ones, on your computer, but never send proprietary material to us. Our team can run a DFMEA on a public design for you. A DFMEA on your own proprietary design needs a commercial agreement. Spine comes as is. Commercial use needs a separate written agreement with us.

1. What this license covers

This license covers the Spine desktop application for macOS and Windows, including its documentation, the example model supplied with it, and updates (together, "Spine"). It also covers the example DFMEA and the optional public-design DFMEA described in section 6.

Distribution channels include the Microsoft Store, where Spine is listed as "Spine-MBSE". Wherever you got Spine, this license is the agreement between you and us.

2. You may evaluate Spine

We give you a free, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to install Spine on computers you use and to use it to evaluate whether Spine suits your needs, for as long as this license lasts.

You may evaluate Spine on a computer owned by your employer, and you may try it on your own designs. Two kinds of content are treated differently:

  • Local content is anything you use in Spine on your computer. It may include your own designs, or your employer's designs if you have your employer's authority to use them. It stays on your computer and we never see it (section 5). You use it at your own risk: see sections 5 and 8.
  • Content you send to us, such as a DFMEA request or an email, must be public and non-confidential. Never send us proprietary or confidential material (section 6).

3. Evaluation only — no production use

You may not use Spine for production use. "Production use" means using Spine, or anything it produces:

  • as part of the engineering record, release, verification or safety case of a product that is, or is intended to be, sold, supplied or put into service;
  • to deliver work to a customer or employer as a deliverable; or
  • as a tool your organization relies on in its normal engineering process.

Commercial and production use require a separate written agreement with BIG Intelligence. Contact us at sales@bigintelligenceai.com.

4. What you may not do

You may not:

  • use Spine for production use (section 3);
  • install or run Spine on a shared server, or in any setup where more than one person uses one installation;
  • provide Spine, or what it does, to others as a service, whether or not you charge for it;
  • distribute, sublicense, rent, sell or publish Spine or any part of it;
  • remove or change any notice, attribution or label in Spine, including the Evaluation Edition label;
  • reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble Spine, or extract any method, rule set, prompt or instruction it contains or supplies to an AI provider, except to the extent the law, or the license of an open-source component (including the LGPL, EPL and MPL), allows you to despite this restriction; or
  • use Spine in breach of any law, including export-control and sanctions law.

5. Your content, and what we can see

Your content is yours. You keep all rights in what you put into Spine and what you produce with it: your requirements, models, analyses and documents. We claim no rights in any of it.

It stays on your computer. Spine stores your content on your computer. It does not send your content to us, and we cannot see it. We do not back it up. Keeping it safe, secure and backed up is your responsibility.

Your AI provider. Spine works with an AI assistant that you connect, under your own account with that provider. Spine does not call an AI model itself. What your AI assistant reads, and what its provider does with it, is governed by your agreement with that provider, not by this license.

6. DFMEA — the example, public designs, and your own designs

Spine Evaluation Edition is for assessing the tool only, not for production or commercial engineering work. BIG Intelligence gives no confidentiality undertaking for evaluation submissions. Do not submit confidential, proprietary, trade-secret, personal, classified or export-controlled information. This does not limit rights or obligations that the law does not allow to be waived.

Who runs a DFMEA. Only BIG Intelligence personnel run a DFMEA. You cannot run one through Spine or choose how it is processed. We run an evaluation DFMEA only after confirming that the design is public and non-proprietary, and we may process it through either our Claude subscription or the Anthropic API. A DFMEA on proprietary material requires a separate written commercial agreement and is processed only through our commercial API workflow.

The example DFMEA. BIG Intelligence publishes, as a separate download, a DFMEA it ran on the example model supplied with Spine, which is built from a public-domain source. You may import it and use it to evaluate how Spine handles a DFMEA.

A DFMEA on a public design (optional, free, evaluation only). You may ask us to run one DFMEA on a design that is public, through our request form. By submitting a request you confirm that:

  • the design is public, or is yours to share, and contains no confidential or proprietary information of your employer, a client or anyone else;
  • it contains no export-controlled technical data, including data controlled under the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations;
  • you have removed people's names and other personal data you do not need to send; and
  • the source you give us for the design is accurate.

Because you have told us the design is not confidential, we do not treat it as confidential and give no confidentiality or security undertaking for it. Do not submit confidential, proprietary, trade-secret, personal, classified or export-controlled information. We use it only to run your request. We run it through a third-party AI provider, listed in our privacy notice, under that provider's terms, which may allow the provider to use it, including to train AI models. We delete our copies, including your request record, within 90 days of returning the result. We publish it, or the result, only if you tick the box that allows us to, and then only with the credit you choose. We review each request before running it and may decline, limit or delay any request without giving a reason, including one we think may contain proprietary material. We do not promise a turnaround time. If anyone tells us material was sent that should not have been, we delete it.

A DFMEA on your own proprietary design is not part of this license. It requires a separate written agreement with BIG Intelligence, and we process it only through our commercial API workflow. That agreement covers what an evaluation does not, such as confidentiality, data handling, turnaround and support.

The example DFMEA and any public-design DFMEA are illustrative, not a safety case, and are provided as is, on the terms of sections 8 and 9. What we return to you is yours, subject to any open license on the design it was built from.

7. Updates, and the version you have

Spine checks for updates at its distribution point: GitHub on macOS, the Microsoft Store on Windows. See the privacy notice for exactly what this involves.

We may change or stop offering Spine or any service at any time. We will not reach into a copy on your computer and switch it off. A version you have installed keeps working as it is, under this license, until the license ends.

8. No warranty

Spine is evaluation software, supplied as is and as available, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that Spine is error-free, secure, or suitable for any purpose. We provide no support, maintenance or availability commitment.

Design authority stays with you. Spine assists engineering work: it checks proposed changes against rules and records what you approve. You are responsible for every engineering decision and for checking anything Spine or an AI produces. Spine is not certified under ISO 26262, IEC 61508, DO-178C or any other functional-safety standard, and it is not a means of complying with any standard or regulation.

Reference content is unverified. Spine includes AI-generated summaries of regulations and standards. They have not been verified, may be incomplete or wrong, and are not the regulation. Check any summary against the published text before relying on it.

9. Limits on our liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, BIG Intelligence is not liable for any loss or damage arising from Spine or any DFMEA provided under section 6, including loss of data, loss of profit, business interruption, or indirect or consequential loss. Because Spine is free, our total liability to you for anything else is limited to US$100.

Nothing in this license limits liability that the law does not allow us to limit, such as liability for intentional misconduct or gross negligence, for death or personal injury, or under mandatory product-liability law. If you are a consumer, you keep the rights your local consumer law gives you.

10. Feedback

If you send us ideas or feedback about Spine, we may use them without obligation to you.

11. How this license ends

You may end this license at any time by uninstalling Spine. It ends automatically if you break it. We may end it by notice, for example by publishing a new license version that you would have to accept to keep using Spine. When it ends, you must stop using Spine. Your content remains yours. Sections 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12 and 13 survive.

12. Privacy

Our privacy notice explains what personal data we handle and why: https://bigintelligenceai.com/spine/privacy. In short, Spine sends nothing about you or your work to us; we handle only what you choose to send us. On macOS, Spine's update check is visible to GitHub (see the privacy notice).

13. General

  • Governing law: Michigan law governs this license, excluding its conflict-of-law rules. The state or federal courts located in Wayne County, Michigan have exclusive jurisdiction, except that a consumer may also bring proceedings where the law of their country allows.
  • Export and sanctions: you may not use or export Spine where US or other applicable export-control or sanctions law forbids it.
  • US government users: Spine is commercial computer software provided under this license only.
  • Open-source components: Spine includes components licensed by others under their own licenses. They are listed, with their license texts, in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt in Spine's resources folder, and Electron's and Chromium's notices are in the third-party folder beside it. The notices file also says where the source code of the LGPL, EPL and MPL components is published. Nothing here restricts rights those licenses give you.
  • Whole agreement: this is the whole agreement between us about the evaluation of Spine. A commercial agreement, if you sign one, governs what it covers.
  • Severability: if part of this license is unenforceable, the rest still applies.
  • Assignment: you may not transfer this license. We may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganization of our business.
  • Changes: if we change this license, Spine will ask you to accept the new version before you continue to use it.

14. Accepting this license

You accept this license by clicking Agree when Spine first runs. Spine records which version you accepted and when. If you do not agree, do not use Spine.

Contact: BIG INTELLIGENCE AI, LLC · 44940 Lindsey Drive, Van Buren Township, MI 48111, USA · sales@bigintelligenceai.com