Version 0.1. A draft, published so it can be argued with. Not ratified, not in force, and not currently accepting anything.
draft . not ratified . not in force
Publishing these is not adopting them. No corpus contribution is being accepted under this document or any other. It is here so that the people it would bind can read it before it binds them, and object while objecting is still cheap.
Two gates must clear before ratification, and neither is a formality. A lawyer has not read it, and sections 3 and 6 are a perpetual licence grant and a relicensing power, which are the two clauses that are expensive to get wrong. And GOSSIP is not yet a legal person: these terms grant a licence to GOSSIP, and a licence granted to a project that is not a legal entity is a weak licence. This is the problem OpenStreetMap solved by creating a foundation.
The full draft, including the drafting notes that explain why each clause is shaped the way it is, is the contributor terms in the repository. What follows is the contributor-facing half in plain language.
You grant wide. The commons is permanent. Those two clauses are one bargain and neither survives being read without the other.
An observation plus its receipt: something you noticed about how a group of people behaves, and where you saw it. The pair is the unit. Output from a scraper, a bot, or an unattended pipeline is not a contribution, however open the source. Collection is not authorship.
Everything you did not deliberately contribute. Your workspace, your saved queries, your unshared drafts. You keep your own copyright in your own observation; nothing here is an assignment, and you can publish or license it anywhere else on any terms at any time.
For each contribution, a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual licence to use, reproduce, adapt, publish and sublicense it as part of the corpus. This is deliberately broad, and the next clause is the constraint on it.
A version of the corpus will always be publicly available under a free and open licence. Permanent, and intended to survive any change of ownership or control. This is the clause you are actually relying on.
The database under ODbL 1.0, the contents under DbCL 1.0, which is the pairing OpenStreetMap uses. Worth knowing what the second one means: a single observation of yours, quoted on its own, carries no share-alike obligation on the person quoting it. Share-alike protects the database, not the sentence.
gossip reads publics and aggregates, never private individuals. This predates the corpus and it is enforced when you submit rather than later when someone complains.
These are the parts a reader can most usefully attack, and they are printed rather than buried because attacking them is the point of publishing the draft at all.
Two honest ways to write the grant. One keeps it broad, constrained only by the permanence promise, which leaves open the possibility of separately licensing the database to a buyer who cannot accept share-alike. The other narrows the grant so it is exercisable only for publishing the corpus under a free and open licence, which permanently forecloses that.
The recommendation reversed in favour of the narrow version, on the ground that the broad grant spends contributor trust to protect a sell option on the most contested asset while an uncontested one sits beside it. The honest counterargument, which lost: narrowing later is easy and unilateral, while widening later is the re-consent problem that cost OpenStreetMap data in 2012.
A licence change would require a supermajority of recent contributors once there are enough of them. The numbers currently written down are 50 contributors, 12 months, and two thirds. These are placeholders. They are defensible and they are derived from nothing. Below the threshold the operator may change the licence within the permanence constraint, because a supermajority of three people is not a safeguard.
Send the clause number and what is wrong with it. This is one of the contribution types that is open today, and it needs nothing from you but the argument.
About half the rows the house has collected come from Reddit’s rooms. Several pages print figures made from them: the house counts on the front door, the rooms and their item counts on /data/, the sources reporting and the readings on /today/, and the lanes on the listening layer. Each carries a line saying so.
Reddit’s Data API terms give the house a licence it may not pass on, over content Reddit says belongs to its users (§ 2.4), and they reach data derived from that content (§ 6). The corpus licence works by passing rights on to everyone who receives the database. If those terms reach the figures, the house has no right to pass them on, so the corpus licence does not cover figures made from Reddit, and nothing on this site offers them under it.
The figures are shown while counsel reads Reddit’s terms (2026-10-12). The k ≥ 20 floor applies to them as to every figure; that floor limits who can be identified, and Reddit’s terms concern where the data came from.
version 0.1, published for comment 17 aug 2026. nothing on this page is in force. the operative document does not exist yet.