License info on about.commonsearch.org

[mlinksva]

I imagine especially among early potential contributors, many will start by checking whether the project really is open. To avoid making them hunt, I suggest:

• License on/for about.commonsearch.org materials (CC-BY?)
• Easy to find note that software produced by the project is Apache 2 licensed, and all dependencies open source

[sylvinus]

Great point!

Somewhat unrelated, but what about the license of the results themselves? Does Common Crawl's license allow us to re-license the results under a Creative Commons license? What about our other data sources?

[mlinksva]

I think it would be fine to license results under eg CC-BY, but it depends what exactly the results consist of and their relation to said data sources. Also whether you want to imply the results are subject to copyright (if not, CC0).

The Common Crawl ToU probably has no bearing, but it is not incredibly clear. Whether ODP's CC-BY with an onerous and probably not allowed by the license attribution requirement has any bearing on search results using that database depends on the details and no doubt would be debatable. Certainly would be good to get more eyes on this.