PhysX licensing and a valid way to include in an open-source project

Hello,

I’m coming here due to some strange circumstances.

I had an open-source game engine on GitHub and it was using PhysX 4.1;

The configuration was as follows:
. Engine had a dedicated submodule for third-parties.
. PhysX 4.1 was included as a submodule of the third-party module (content was not copied; naturally, license file was included after recursive pull);
. ‘.lib’ files generated on my machine were also uploaded as blobs in the same repository (found one bug, reported it and the maintainers found the fix; I had that fix applied before build and it was documented there too);

For a reason unknown to me, GitHub randomly suspended my account about a month and 3 weeks ago and did not provide an explanation; support has yet to answer me and I am moving the repository to GitLab now, because I need to continue my work one way or another.

Please let me know if the configuration described above might have violated any of NVIDIA’s policy that I might not be aware of. GitHub has not given me a reason and I’m both cautious and paranoid about what I push elsewhere.

If further details are required, I’ll be more than happy to provide them. Also, here’s a post I created on their forums: My account got suspended without notification. Want some thoughts about what might have been the cause. · community · Discussion #150306 · GitHub

Thank you in advance,
Nikoloz

If you simply included the binary for PhysX and had all the disclaimers, License files etc. in place I do not think that that was the reason for your account closure. Of course I am not a lawyer and this is not advice or counsel, so you should wait until Github gets back to you.

Thank you!

Just in case, the binaries themselves did not have the copy of the license next to them, but the license would be coming with the PhysX submodule “as-is”, so recursive pull was strictly necessary for that. Having said that, without PhysX repo, include statements would fail as soon as one would try to compile the engine.

In any case, at this point I have a [potentially misguided] theory that their automation system responsible for flagging suspicious account had a bug and that was the actual reason. In case that happened to many accounts “in bulk”, the lack of response over nearly 2 months at this point may be explained by the support team being short-stuffed for all I know. “Radio-Silence” on my blog post, as well as the personal research I’ve done so far give me that impression.

Anyway, I hope they indeed get back to me eventually and at least explain what happened and why and if I need to fix anything, such that I do not have to resort to the “wild speculations” and excessive caution moving forward.

Sent them another mail and they answered surprisingly soon after.

Turns out, it had nothing to do with the engine, licensing or any public repository at all :D

It was due to some archives I uploaded thinking it was ok to store upwards to a terabyte of images there and turns out it was a bad idea.

Sorry for bothering you on this thread once more and thank you again for the response.

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