License discussion
Congrats on the release, but doing non-commercial datasets in 2025 is not great. The big AI companies will find a way to gobble this up and all others will not touch this, so I don't think this is a great way to protect the data.
Given this is a pre-release, things are bound to change which is why I opened this discussion to say this: I would highly recommend putting the least-strict license on this release. Perhaps an MIT or Apache 2.0 license.
An added voice: if I understand correctly, the source material is public data that you have put a lot of work in in OCR'ing and correcting, making them a highly valuable resource! But if the data were initially public domain, what are the reasons for restricting its OCR'd output? Is it to protect the dataset from being immediately used by companies in commercial LLMs? They don't care and will eat this data up, just like any other data they can find. In practice I fear this restriction will only hurt researchers who wish to open-source/open-science their work, not being able to share their end results with permissive licenses.
Again, to emphasize, this is Herculean work and it is impressive that you make it available!
Hi all, thanks for raising your voices here and doing so in such kind ways. Rest assured that, in its final form, this dataset will be released under a permissive license. While I understand some degree of skepticism about whether actors in the ecosystem will engage respectfully, I don’t see it as a foregone conclusion. Our thesis is that, by releasing data (and specifically impactful data), we have a chance to open up conversations across the ecosystem (including this one), begin setting norms that fundamentally change the dynamics within it, and ultimately help ensure the public-interest has a strong foothold in AI. How can we iterate toward terms and norms that advantage public-interest efforts, and those who support them, while making as much knowledge as accessible as possible? This dataset and its Early-Access terms are a first step in answering that question by exploring whether opening up the data sooner, under an initial set of terms, can build new types of community engagement on a path to transitioning the data to more traditional terms and licenses. And if we can work with the community to establish clarity and trust around those terms—including where they’ll land in our final releases—it’s my hope that everyone will be able to engage, with confidence, with every dataset we release. I’ll be writing more in a forthcoming blog post, but wanted to share my immediate thoughts here.
It’s my hope that everyone will be able to engage, with confidence, with every dataset we release.
Love to hear it. Such a good release‼️
Seconding @BramVanroy , it will be interesting for the ecosystem to get feedback on how commercial players interact with the release and whether the initial license choice primarily affects them or smaller open-source reusers.