The Open Knowledge Foundation has launched the Open Definition Licenses Service.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The service is ultra simple in purpose and function. It provides:
- Information on licenses for open data, open content, and open-source software in machine readable form (JSON)
- A simple web API that allows you retrieve this information over the web — including using javascript in a browser via JSONP
In addition to the service there’s also:
- A licenses git repo and project on github
- An Open Licenses dataset on the DataHub. . . .
There's data on more than 100 open (and a few closed) licenses including all OSI-approved open source licenses and all Open Definition conformant open data and content licenses. Also included are a few closed licenses as well as "generics" — licensed representing a category (useful where a user does not know the exact license but knows, for example, that the material only requires attribution).
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