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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

For any digital crowdsourced dictionary to be useful and viable, step one is to have an open license to prevent contributors from being turned off by the thought of contributing their efforts to what might eventually just end up as commercial as Urban Dictionary. This project makes no mentioning of licensing at all though. That shouldn't be an afterthought.

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>For any digital crowdsourced dictionary to be useful and viable

I'm pro open licenses, but you're overstating things. The sheer usefulness and viability of Urban Dictionary attests to the fact that most people don't actually care about licenses.

> The sheer usefulness and viability of Urban Dictionary attests to the fact that most people don't actually care about licenses.

Urban Dictionary is indeed extremely useful, but I think making this out to be evidence that people don't care is oversimplifying things. As useful as it is, it's still pretty clear that the licensing (along with a few other lacks, open moderation, etc.) severely holds it back from being as comprehensive & accurate a source as it could be. It achieves usefulness through sheer volume: the vast majority of entries on it are nonsense, there's just so many that there are diamonds to be found in the rough.

I only claimed that most people don't care (which is indeed borne out by UD's success) as direct evidence contradicting the claim I quoted.

I certainly agree that UD could be even better, including through better licensing.

I agree with you. The thought of licensing won't cross the mind of the vast majority of people.

But yeah better licensing would still be nice.

Is it supposed to be an accurate source?

It’s a bit of an in-joke repository.

It's not supposed to be, but I wish it were. An accurate source of slang & contemporary language would be fantastic.

Hacker News doesn't have an open license either, which doesn't seem to turn you off from contributing.

Throwing messages in conversations is not the same as contribute to curate a linguistic data base, both in term of cognitive load and easiness to lucratively despoil contributors.

Does not stop 3rd party readers like the one I paid for and am using now to make the experience a little more what works for me.

I don't think folks should rush to infer stuff from this. There's a kind of dogma about open licenses which often undermines the very efforts proponents say it supports.

Another way to say that is it might be unwise to let ideological peer pressure coerce you into an open license, under the guise of serving some imagined superset of users who "really want" and "otherwise can't use" that, while ignoring the actual market segment who would happily use your product commercially, and the benefits that such restrictive protection provide.

Open source can be abused to coerce newcomers to surrender any competitive advantage they might compound by using such "imaginary market" and "ideological purity" arguments, when in reality it may just be a tool of incumbents to weaken any competition, by eroding a startup's ability to capture value.

Or in a pithy form: "Go open source! It's bad if you don't" said the Big Bad Wolf Corp to the Little Piggy Startup. "Oh yes, Mr Wolf, anything to please!" said the Little Piggy Startup, trusting the Big Wolf, because, who would want to hurt Little Piggy?

Be cautious before you change anything and consider many options! If your instinct is to stick to stronger protections, then it might be wise to do that!

I was already looking for a bug tracker to fix the swallowed newlines and blank lines after submitting... I'm so used to open source now, it somehow surprises me not to be able to find at least a public bug tracker even if I can't directly submit a simple fix.

One can share "feedback" via Google Docs, though :') yeah, no thanks

Now that you point out the data license, yeah, this project will definitely be dead within two years. No sustainable license and not interesting enough to revisit daily like Mastodon, so it will neither build a community nor a sustainable dataset. It's simple enough that part time support will let it survive in the background for a while, but colour me surprised if the author hasn't fully moved on come 2026

I would be more concerned about accuracy, bias and curation sooner than I would think about the license in case of a community-built dataset. Take a website such as TasteAtlas, for example. They frequently publish rankings of best/worst foodstufs, but their data on that is garbage (even if you skip the fact that taste is highly subjective). Not only are there lots of incorrect assumptions made (e.g. a dish always belongs to only one national cuisine), but also the popularity data is not curated at all, so they end up with situations such as the first place in my country on the "100 Best Food Destinations" list was a tiny village with a truck stop.

That would make it harder to make money with this project if it becomes successful in the future.

I think that's what the parent is saying. Are the site's users unpaid labor? That was a thing corporations tried to do when back when urban dictionary was starting, but in today's climate working for a corporation for free doesn't have the cachet it used to.

> That would make it harder to make money with this project if it becomes successful in the future

This may actually be a feature, not a bug.

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