Request for feedback: Sharing and licensing data

[typpo]

Recently I've been getting more requests from academics and other projects that are interested in tax data. I want to share our data as a public resource, but I think it should be licensed appropriately.

The code is licensed under AGPL, which requires anyone who modifies the project or serves this site to publish their code. AGPL is a software license, so I think the data files would be better licensed under Creative Commons.

Some considerations

• Attribution. I think this is a requirement.
• Non-Commercial. This also seems like it should be a requirement.
• Share-Alike. Should those who use our data be required to release their own adaptations publicly under the same license?

[rgbkrk]

CC BY-NC-SA is fine with me.

One thing to note though is that it could mean that journalists can not use the data if they wish to publish results in a for-profit newspaper. It's one thing to prevent real estate companies from access, it's another to defeat the intent of sharing information for the public. If that's a concern, I'd use CC BY-SA since it still requires the creator to use the same license (they would not be able to sell the data).

[jamesshannon]

TBH, I don't' see the point of a commercial-use restriction when the source code is easily runnable and new, unrestricted data can be easily reproduced. I'd assume most commercial entities (e.g., real estate companies) that see any value in this already have the data, whether through scrapers they've developed or some sort of commercial service that makes this available already.