Is this free and open source software?

govtrack / govtrack.us-web

The Django source code for the GovTrack.us website.

https://www.govtrack.us

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Is this free and open source software? #151

Open marctjones opened 7 years ago

marctjones commented 7 years ago

I do not see a copy of a open source license in the code base or a licensing statement in the README file. Is this released under a open source license?

JoshData commented 7 years ago

Hi Marc! This repo isn't, for a few uninteresting reasons, but the code here is just a part of our work. We also helped start and contribute to several of the repos in https://github.com/unitedstates, which is where much of our data, or the scripts to gather the data, is stored -- those repos are all open source/public domain. Happy to answer further questions and if there's something in here that you're thinking about reusing, I'm also happy to talk about how that could be possible.

shadoath commented 6 years ago

What are your "uninteresting" reasons?

JoshData commented 6 years ago

Hello Skylar. It's a range of things like-

No one has actually expressed a serious interest in reusing the code here.
There isn't much here that would be reusable for anything other than creating a clone of GovTrack that does exactly the same thing, which is probably why no one has ever been seriously interested in reusing anything. (The parts that are reusable are in other repositories, as I noted above, which are open source.)
I'd have to review the content in the repository to check that there's nothing in here that I'm not able to license.
I don't have time to support an open source project in the broad sense, with documentation, a community, etc.

shadoath commented 6 years ago

Hello Josh, thank you for going into details about this. I'll dive into what is being used on GovTrack and see what I want to reuse there.