License if you publish an open source project that uses the API

General
1

I recently created a small private project that uses the iNaturlist API to query and later visualize observation data. Thereby are no observations uploaded. I wanted to publish the project on GitHub and wondered if I needed to provide a specific license. Unfortunately, after several hours of searching in the documentation, I have not found any reference. Thanks for your help!

2

hi there!

so, I have only bare minimum knowledge of the API or coding, but others with more knowledge frequent the forum and should be able to be more helpful than I.

what are you trying to accomplish?

will you be making any money off of this project? from my understanding, use of the data and reasonable use of the API are free use, but individual images and sounds are usually copyrighted.

iNat mostly makes use of existing license formats such as CC-BY-NC.

3

I don’t want to earn any money with it. I have developed a kind of bird-dex with Grafana. It shows me a dashboard with all the birds that have been spotted in a certain area and marks the birds that I have already found. It is expandable to any location, user and taxon. I have been looking for a code project like this but have not found it. So I developed it myself and I can imagine that others looking for someting like this and might want to use what I did.

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4

I would think that any license you choose when you publish on GitHub would only apply to the code that you wrote. The iNaturalist data would be separately licensed as determined by the user who provided that data (observation notes, comments, images and sounds).

So you should decide what license you want to apply to the code you have written.

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5

That was also my assumption. Thanks for your input.

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