[joshdickson]

The licensing terms are identical to similar projects including OpenFoodFacts (which also has an app) and OpenStreetMap, see:

https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/ODBL_License

You may disagree with each of those projects as well, but, I am following long-standing licensing in this space. I also have used some OFF data for product naming, and as a result, their terms state I have to maintain their license.

Creating these databases involves a tremendous amount of time and effort, and it would not make sense for me to make this data available to commercial entities to use without attribution. The alternative is not a MIT-licensed dataset, it is no dataset.

[neilv]

The two you cite, OpenFoodFacts and OpenStreetMap are non-profit/not-for-profit, known for their databases, not for competing commercial apps.

I appreciate the difficulty of building a good database. Can you say why you created a new one, rather than starting with OpenFoodFacts? (Was it quality issues? Too hard to update? You wanted additional info? You didn't want their licensing terms? You wanted the advertising boost?)

[joshdickson]

I've explained why OFF is not an adequate source in and of itself for a food logging app elsewhere in the thread. If it were usable in and of itself, I wouldn't have had anything to build on the database front and would have just used it as-is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43570775