Licenses API

The Open Definition states: "A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike."

Data on more than 100 open licenses

Including all OSI-approved open source licenses and all Open Definition conformant open data and content licenses. Provided in easy to use, machine readable JSON -- perfect if you need to drop a license chooser into your app.

View the licenses available

License Groups

In addition various generic groups are provided that are useful when constructing license choice lists, including non-commercial options, generic Public Domain and more. Pre-packaged groups include:

• All licenses
• OSI compliant
• Open Definition compliant
• Specially selected set developed for CKAN that is perfect for data and content site license choosers.

Format

JSON hashes with the following keys:

{
    "id": "ODC-BY-1.0", 
    "domain_content": false, 
    "domain_data": true, 
    "domain_software": false, 
    "od_conformance": "approved", 
    "osd_conformance": "not reviewed", 
    "status": "active", 
    "title": "Open Data Commons Attribution License 1.0", 
    "url": "https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by"
}

Spot an error, think we should have more info? Please file an issue or submit a patch.

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How do I use it?

Get the data

Download the licenses, either all in one, individually (see below) or in specific groups (see above).

For example, here's how to use curl to access an individual license:

curl https://licenses.opendefinition.org/licenses/ODC-BY-1.0.json

And here's how to use curl to access the CKAN license group:

curl https://licenses.opendefinition.org/licenses/groups/ckan.json

Git Access

You can also get the material as a git repo:

git clone https://github.com/okfn/licenses

Javascript Access (JSONP)

We also provide a simple way to get direct access from javascript in the browser using JSONP, by providing versions of the all of the data in the jsonp subdirectory wrapped in a callback function named

license_callback

Thus, the JSONP version of a file named:

xyz.json

whether it is a license group or an individual license, will be located at:

licenses/jsonp/xyz.json

For example from jQuery:

$.ajax({
    url:'https://licenses.opendefinition.org/groups/jsonp/ODC-BY-1.0.js',
    dataType: 'jsonp',
    // you *must* set the callback function to be license_callback
    jsonpCallback: 'license_callback',
    success: function(data) {
        console.log('License title is ' + data.title);
    }
});

Because our JSONP data is served from a static files, it has a hardcoded callback function and therefore must name your callback function for the JSONP request

license_callback

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Licenses List

Approved as conforming to the Open Definition
Approved as conforming to the Open Source Definition