Under what license is Ohloh's content released?

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dartar

over 2 years ago

I got stuck on this question while I was wondering if I could use one of the graphs from the PHP Eats Ruby article to illustrate the Ohloh listing on Wikipedia. I then realised that the content of that article is (c) Ohloh so the graphs could not be used as such on Wikipedia.

Whence the question: under what terms/license are Ohloh's data released, when not explicitly stated? This applies to the content of the website, the widgets and the data accessible via the API. The FAQ do not make any reference to license/term of use of Ohloh's data.

Lacking explicit license information other than the vague attribution requirement mentioned in the API's terms of use, it is hard to determine what kind of use of your data is legitimate and what would be a copyright infringement. Please make terms of use/license explicit and in case you opt for some common content license consider adding license metadata within your website header.

(Oh and on a side note, apologies if this has already been discussed somewhere but I couldn't search the forum.

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Jason Allen

over 2 years ago

Thanks for the useful question. We'll discuss it over lunch and get back to you.

forum search: you can always search the forums by using the standard (top right of page) search bar - but you then have to click on the "posts" choice after getting the result.

I agree it's not optimal - we'll add a more prominent search forums tool to all forum-related pages soon.

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Jonan

over 2 years ago

Have you found an answer to this question?

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ArneBab

about 1 year ago

I'd like to repeat the question of Jonan:

Under which license is the content on Ohloh released?

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Scott Collison

about 1 year ago

Hi Dartar, Jonan and ArneBab,

Sorry about the delay in getting you an answer to this. We simply haven't paid as much attention to this as we should have.

As you probably know we have three ways of distributing our content to folks:

  1. From our web site
  2. Through our widgets
  3. Via our API

As it turns out we spent more time thinking about our API and widgets and not enough about the site itself!

Here is what we plan to do. This will apply to all Ohloh content.

  1. We will license our site content in such a way that the content may be used even for commercial purposes as long as Ohloh receives attribution and that the derivative work is licensed under the same terms.
  2. We will not allow screen scraping of our site, since that is a drag on site performance. If somebody wants to get a lot of data, we point them to our API, where you can make up to 1,000 queries a month. This content may also be used for commercial purposes as long as derivative works are licensed under the same terms.
  3. If you want to make more than 1,000 queries a day then we will have to make a special arrangement.

If you have any comments or suggestions let me know. We are very open to feedback on this topic. We plan to make these changes to our terms next week.

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Ivan Vučica

about 1 year ago

It would seem that in such case it's ok to use it on Wikipedia. Correct?

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Scott Collison

about 1 year ago

Yes, that would be an ideal use.

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dartar

about 1 year ago

Before using any content in Wikipedia, explicit license information must be provided. I suggest you create a page called Terms of use or How to use Ohloh's content and add pointers to this page from all parts of the project where content is generated. If you opt for CC licenses you can also embed license metadata in your HTML source.

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Dustin Hamilton

about 1 year ago

I too will vote on dartar's idea for creating Terms of Use

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Scott Collison

about 1 year ago

So we finally (sigh!) straightened out our Terms of Service so that you can post any content generated by Ohloh on your site or on Wikipedia.

I stuck to almost everything I outlined in my previous post. The only departure is that Ohloh does not require that derivative work be licensed under the same terms as we license it.

As always feedback is appreciated and, again, sorry for the delay in getting this done.

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dartar

about 1 year ago

Scott, can you confirm whether point i. in your previous post (as translated into the new Terms of Service) falls under a CC-attribution 3.0 license? This (or even a more restrictive CC-attribution-share-alike 3.0) would be fully compatible with use on Wikipedia.

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ArneBab

about 1 year ago

"Ohloh grants you a royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide, non-transferable, non-exclusive, limited license to use, reproduce and publicly display (but not modify)the "Ohloh Materials on Ohloh’s website (“Data”) in and/or on any of your online publications and/or web pages, provided that you agree to attribute Ohloh as the source of any Data that you include in your publications"

This (to my understanding) seems to be rather incompatible with the Wikipedia, since Wikipedia content by definition must be modifyable.

I didn't find any information about the licenses for "Third Party Content".

Is something still missing, or did I overlook something?

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Scott Collison

about 1 year ago

OK We have finally revised the license to be compatible with Wikipedia. We just had a different understanding of "modify" than the GFDL. We understood it as "to change," i.e. I changed my Kudorank from a 4 to a 9 and then posted it on Wikipedia. Now we understand "modify" as in "to create a derivative work," which is fine with us. So the new language reads as follows.

Ohloh grants you a royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide, non-transferable, non-exclusive, limited license to use, reproduce, modify and publicly display the "Ohloh Materials" ("Materials") on Ohloh’s website in and/or on any of your online publications and/or web pages, provided that you agree to attribute Ohloh as the source of any "Materials" and that you include in your publications and/or web pages a link from your website to www.ohloh.net.

As for third party content, you must receive permission from them to use their contributions, since they retain the copyright for their submissions.

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ArneBab

about 1 year ago

I'm not perfectly sure if "requiring a backlink" works, but "requiring attribution" definitely fits, and the rest now sounds great!

(And most people just use links as attribution naturally :) )

To make it easier for people to spread your content, you could create a template for attribution. This could, for example, be:

"code analysis copied from www.ohloh.net"

best with a version of your slogan added which doesn't sound too much like advertising :)

But I assume most people will just use your widgets, and those directly contain the link :-)

Many thanks for your clarification (I well understand reservations about "changing", but there's always the original source to check a claim), and for making your content available!

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Scott Collison

about 1 year ago

Thanks for the feedback -- and your patience. So I think we have something now that is actionable. I decided that the back link language really didn't make much sense. So now it reads.

Subject to the terms and conditions of this section, Ohloh grants you a royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide, non-transferable, non-exclusive, limited license to use, reproduce, modify and publicly display the "Ohloh Materials" ("Materials") on Ohloh’s website in and/or on any of your online publications and/or web pages, provided that you agree to attribute Ohloh as the source of any "Materials."

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