[driscoll42]

I looked into this a bit earlier this year. I'm mixed on it. While the FOSS in me wants it all open-source and available to use given that I'm basically labeling training data for them for free, and they are funded by donations/grants, I get value out of it for free.

My desire was to combine something like iNaturalist with BirdWeather for a bird tracker of audio and visual. BirdWeather does make it free which is great, but there's no great free API of iNaturalist quality for diverse bird tracking.

That being said, I am certain that if iNaturaist made their model public, tons of competitive apps would spring up and it'd be commercialized regardless of license immediately and would take people away from iNaturalist without giving iNaturalist anything in return.

Plus I know iNaturalist has issues with that they don't want autolabeled data uploaded as matched. They only want manually labeled data, which opening the API I'm sure would flood their server with ML labeled data. Which on the one hand, could be useful, but also a ton of noise.

I'm in favor of whatever option is most in line with keeping a long term success of a free, high quality plant/animal identifying app out there, and I don't know enough to take a definitive stance on that, and unfortunately those that do, probably have a vested interest in one of the outcomes.