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LICENSE file missing — which license does this repo use? #3

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@RMV-Coder

repos/bettergovph/ai-budget currently reports license: null, so the repository is — strictly — all rights reserved. Meanwhile /api/v1/openapi.json declares CC-BY-4.0, and the source dataset bettergovph/gaa on Hugging Face is CC0-1.0.

The intent is obviously open. But without a LICENSE file, contributions sit in an awkward place, and downstream reuse — other BetterGov repos, researchers, journalists quoting figures — has nothing to point at.

I'd like to add the file, but picking a license is yours to decide, so: which one?

The org precedent points two ways

Roughly: the data-shaped projects went CC0, the app-shaped ones went MIT. This repo is both — a Worker application and a published dataset pipeline — which may be exactly why it hasn't been settled yet.

One option worth considering is stating them separately: MIT for the code in src/ and scripts/, CC0-1.0 (or CC-BY-4.0) for the generated data and the API responses. That matches how the project actually gets used, and it's what the OpenAPI spec is already gesturing at.

A related inconsistency

CC-BY-4.0, which openapi.json currently declares, matches nothing else in the org — not the sibling repos, not the upstream dataset. So whichever way this goes, the spec's info.license probably needs to change too, or the repo needs to say explicitly that code and data carry different terms.

Offer

Tell me which you want and I'll open a small PR with the LICENSE file, a short licensing note in the README, and openapi.json aligned to match. If you'd rather do it yourself, that's completely fine — the useful part of this issue is just flagging that the three places currently disagree.


Context: I've been reading the codebase with an eye to contributing, and this was the one thing I couldn't resolve on my own. Separately I have a PR ready with CI, a CONTRIBUTING file, issue templates, an /llms.txt, and a soft-404 fix — none of it depends on the answer here, so I'll open that regardless. Drafted with AI assistance (Claude Code); I've verified the license claims above against each repo directly.

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