Clarification on License and Commercial Use of IARA

[naokob]

Hello,

Thank you for making IARA publicly available. I am currently evaluating IARA for potential use in a protein-design research workflow.

IARA's core idea of identifying protein surface regions that may be particularly suitable for binder design is highly valuable and practically useful. I appreciate the effort that has gone into developing this approach and sharing it publicly, as it has real potential to improve target-site selection and make protein-design workflows more efficient.

Given the usefulness and potential impact of this approach, I sincerely hope that IARA can eventually be made available under licensing terms that permit commercial use, covering both the source code and the trained model weights. Either a commercially permissive license or a clearly defined process for requesting commercial permission would make it much easier for organizations to evaluate, adopt, and potentially contribute to the project.

With that in mind, I was unable to find a LICENSE file in the repository, nor any separate licensing terms for the trained model file (IARA.pth). Could you please clarify the following points?

1. Source code license
   What license applies to the IARA source code?

2. Model weights license
   Does the same license apply to the trained model weights in IARA.pth, or are separate terms required?

3. Commercial use
   Is commercial use permitted, including:

   • Internal research and development by a commercial organization
   • Use of IARA-generated results in commercial research or product development
   • Integration into a commercial software product or hosted service

4. Modification and redistribution
   Are modification, internal deployment, containerization, and redistribution permitted?

5. Attribution requirements
   Are there any attribution, citation, notice, or other requirements for use?

6. Upstream data and tool restrictions
   Are there any restrictions arising from the training data or upstream tools used to develop the model, such as BindCraft trajectories, RFdiffusion-generated structures, or other datasets?

7. Licensing requests
   If commercial use requires separate permission or a commercial license, could you let us know how such permission can be requested?

Additionally, it would be very helpful if a LICENSE file could be added to the repository, with explicit clarification on whether it covers all repository components, including:

• predict.py
• IARA.pth
• The PyMOL and ChimeraX plugins
• The Colab notebook

Thank you very much for your time, for sharing this valuable work, and for clarifying these points.