Add LICENSE - Githubissues

chicago-police-violence / data

Dataset about the personnel, use of force, and complaints in the Chicago Police Department

MIT License

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Add LICENSE #21

Closed Thibauth closed 3 years ago

Thibauth commented 3 years ago

We need to add licensing information to this repository (also, this seems to be required in the NeurIPS call for paper). We might need a different license for the data and for the code, so this is a bit tricky. Any opinion/suggestion is welcome.

Some useful information and guidelines here.

trevorcampbell commented 3 years ago

So if I understand how FOIA works correctly (I am very likely wrong here), the raw data itself is public domain. Our source code for processing it, as well as the output data files we create via linkage etc can be protected under any license we choose.

I think we should use the CC BY NC license, or at least CC BY , with the additional provisio that the form of attribution is an actual citation to the dataset paper (for both code and our output data).

Thibauth commented 3 years ago

Thanks for your input. However, it is generally considered a bad practice to use a CC license for code (even CC discourages it here). So we should probably use a different license for code, I don't really have a preference, but I think the MIT license would be fine.

trevorcampbell commented 3 years ago

Good point -- MIT license for code sounds fine to me. Do you have any preference for the license of the output cleaned data?

trevorcampbell commented 3 years ago

@Thibauth thoughts on c4c48a6 ?

Thibauth commented 3 years ago

A few comments:

I would prefer to also add the SA (Share Alike) clause to the CC license (sorry I should have mentioned that earlier).
I wonder whether it would be better to keep the two license files separated, say one would be called MIT-LICENSE.txt and the other CC-BY-NC-SA-LICENSE.txt
if we keep the two licenses file separated, then we could even considering moving the MIT-LICENSE.txt file to the src/ folder

In any case, having a small section in the README, as you have done, is a great way to make clear what is covered by what.

trevorcampbell commented 3 years ago

See b945719

switched to plaintext CC license in ea4d7a5
deleted the LICENSE file in 9411df2

I agree about SA and about splitting the files.

I think we should keep the software license in the main folder to indicate that it covers all of the software (not just stuff found in the src folder). E.g. the Makefile is also covered under MIT.

@Thibauth if this all looks good you can close this issue!

Thibauth commented 3 years ago

This is perfect, thanks!