The Open Source Definition (point 6), Freedom 0 of the Free Software Definition, and other similar statements of the core values of the FOSS world require that a FOSS license not restrict use in any field of endeavor, including commercial uses. The CC-BY copyright license meets that test but the non-commercial variants of the Creative Commons licenses do not. We want people to use Ohloh data for commercial purposes as long as we can protect the data’s integrity, so we’re requiring you to ask first when using the site and API. We picked the least restrictive of all the Creative Commons copyright licenses, and are limiting use of the sites and API as little as we can, while still promoting the objective of maintaining a single site. In the end, our approach is more free than CC-BY-NC and will be easier to manage.
Posted in: Using the Data
