When publishing data dictionaries in the bSDD, selecting the right license is essential to ensure your work is used correctly and in line with your intentions. By choosing the right license, you can align the use of your data dictionaries with your goals—whether that’s encouraging collaboration, preserving originality, or enabling widespread adoption.

Note that some licenses do not allow redistribution or modifications, so pay attention when trying to upload definitions that might already exist.

No license

If no license is provided, the default value is set to: “No license (rights reserved)“. This means the content owner has not granted users any particular rights to reuse or redistribute the content. Lacking a license makes it unclear to users how they can legally use your content. Users won’t know if they can share or modify your work, leading to confusion and possibly reduced usage and could leave both you and users vulnerable to legal issues due to ambiguous usage rights.

Publishing in bSDD automatically gives buildingSMART International rights to redistribute content through the Search page and API services, as well as rights to as-intended use of the content by all users of software implementing bSDD.

Assigning a license

To assign a license to a data dictionary, fill in the attributes "License" and "LicenseUrl" in the JSON file you upload. A license is set per version of a data dictionary.

Choosing a license

You can choose any license you like, as well as provide a custom license name, as long as you provide the "LicenseUrl" link explaining what rights it grants. There are several common licensing options, each offering different levels of control and flexibility. Here are a few widely-used licenses and what they mean for your data dictionary:

• Creative Commons - mainly designed for creative works, documentation, and content like data dictionaries. They focus on how content can be shared, remixed, and reused, with options for specifying commercial or non-commercial use, as well as controlling modifications.
  • CC BY 4.0 (Attribution): This license allows others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. It's one of the most open licenses and is ideal for those who want to encourage widespread use while retaining attribution rights.
  • CC BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike): Similar to CC BY, but requires that any adaptations of your work be shared under the same license. It encourages sharing while ensuring that derivative works are also open.
  • CC BY-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NoDerivatives): This license allows others to redistribute your work, both commercially and non-commercially, but they cannot modify it. This is a good option if you want to prevent any alterations to your original content. This is the license that IFC uses.
  • CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial): This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work, but only for non-commercial purposes. It's useful for projects meant for research or educational use without allowing for-profit use.
• Open-source licenses - software licenses approved by OSI, commonly used in software development.
  • MIT License - The MIT License is a very permissive software license that allows anyone to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, or distribute your code, as long as the original authors are credited. This license is commonly used for software development but can be applied to any work. It is less restrictive than CC licenses, making it suitable for projects aiming to encourage modification and widespread distribution without strong control over how the work is used.
  • GNU General Public License (GPL) - The GPL is a "copyleft" license that requires any derivative works based on your original work to also be open source and licensed under the GPL. It's more restrictive than the MIT license but ensures that any changes to your work remain open to the community. While primarily used for software, it can also apply to other types of work, though less commonly for data dictionaries.
  • GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) - allows open-source libraries to be linked to proprietary software, with the condition that modifications to the LGPL-covered components remain open-source. This makes it more permissive than the GPL, offering flexibility for projects that integrate open-source libraries with closed-source code.
  • Apache License 2.0 - allows for free use, modification, and distribution while providing an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users. It requires preservation of the license and notices in redistributed code but does not mandate that derivative works be open-source. This license is commonly used in large-scale open-source projects like the Apache HTTP Server and Android.
  • BSD 3-Clause License - is a permissive license that allows almost unrestricted use, modification, and distribution, as long as attribution is maintained with a clause preventing the use of project or contributor names for endorsement purposes. Widely used in academic and commercial projects due to their flexibility.
  • Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL 2.0) - offers a middle ground between permissive and copyleft licenses. It allows the modification and distribution of source code but requires that any changes to licensed files be made open source. Unlike stricter copyleft licenses, it permits combining open-source files with proprietary code, making it suitable for projects like Mozilla Firefox.

A helpful resource is ChooseALicense.com.