Finalise open licences: Apache-2.0 (code), CC BY 4.0 (data & docs)

All released data licensed CC BY 4.0. Scope boundary per project docs separates the
open ecosystem from proprietary NKENNEAi assets.

Author: KoyoAli

LICENSING.md

@@ -1,27 +1,35 @@
 # Licensing
 
-This ecosystem separates three things: code, documentation, and data — and, within
-data, records the project can openly license from third-party material it cannot.
+Open by default. Everything this project releases is openly licensed.
 
 ## Code and tooling — Apache-2.0
-All software here (validation toolkit, evaluation harness, release tooling, schema)
-is licensed under Apache-2.0. See `LICENSE`.
+The validation toolkit, evaluation harness, release tooling, and schema are licensed
+under Apache-2.0 (`LICENSE`).
 
-Rationale: a permissive licence with an explicit patent grant, universally accepted,
-that places no barrier on adoption by researchers, institutions, or industry.
+Rationale: a permissive licence with an explicit patent grant, universally accepted, that
+places no barrier on adoption by researchers, institutions, or industry.
 
-## Documentation — CC BY 4.0
-Documentation and schema definitions are licensed CC BY 4.0.
+## Data — CC BY 4.0
+All released sentence pairs and their metadata are licensed CC BY 4.0 (`LICENSE-DATA`).
+
+Rationale: the standard open-data licence for research corpora. It permits reuse,
+redistribution, and commercial use with attribution — maximising downstream adoption
+while ensuring the ecosystem and its contributors are credited.
 
-## Released data — CC BY 4.0, for cleared records only
-Sentence pairs are released under CC BY 4.0 **only where the project holds or has cleared
-the rights to redistribute them** — records original to the project, in the public domain,
-or drawn from CC-compatible sources. See `LICENSE-DATA`.
+## Documentation — CC BY 4.0
+Documentation, dataset cards, and schema definitions are licensed CC BY 4.0.
 
-Records from third-party sources under their own licences are redistributed under those
-licences with attribution, or referenced by pointer where redistribution is not permitted.
-**Every release manifest records the licence and attribution for each source it includes.**
-No record is released under CC BY 4.0 unless its provenance permits it.
+## Attribution
+Cite the corpus using `CITATION.cff` and the release DOI. Attribution is required under
+CC BY 4.0 for both data and documentation.
 
 ## Data governance
-Data governance follows the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance alongside FAIR.
+Governance follows the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance alongside FAIR,
+ensuring the communities whose languages are represented share in the benefit and retain
+a voice in how the data is stewarded.
+
+## Scope boundary
+These open licences cover the public ecosystem only — released data, schemas,
+documentation, benchmarks, validation utilities, and contribution infrastructure.
+Proprietary NKENNEAi assets (model weights, commercial APIs, customer data, and
+confidential training methods) are separate and are not covered here.

NOTICE

@@ -2,9 +2,7 @@ Okwu — African Language Commons
 Copyright 2026 ESM Global Productions LLC
 
 This product includes software developed by ESM Global Productions LLC
-and the Okwu open-source community.
+and the Okwu open-source community, licensed under Apache-2.0 (see LICENSE).
 
-Released data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
-International licence (see LICENSE-DATA) for records the project holds or
-has cleared the rights to redistribute. Third-party data sources retain
-their own licences; see each release manifest for attribution.
+Released data and documentation are licensed under the Creative Commons
+Attribution 4.0 International licence (see LICENSE-DATA).

README.md

@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
 Open parallel-text resources for Yorùbá, Swahili and Nigerian Pidgin, together with the
 validation tooling and documented review process used to produce them.
 
-**Current release:** v1.0 · **DOI:** [TODO] · **Licence:** Apache-2.0 (code) · CC BY 4.0 (docs & cleared data) — see [LICENSING.md](LICENSING.md)
+**Current release:** v1.0 · **DOI:** [TODO] · **Licence:** Apache-2.0 (code) · CC BY 4.0 (data & docs) — see [LICENSING.md](LICENSING.md)
 
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