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Governance & licensing

Open spec, closed code

OpenBook is an open standard for sportsbook & gambling data; the document in spec/ is its specification. It standardises the data contract — the schemas in schema/ and the controlled vocabularies in vocabularies/. It says nothing about how any implementer produces, models or prices the data behind a conformant feed.

  • The specification (this folder) is published under CC BY 4.0 — see LICENSE. Anyone may implement it, quote it, and build on it, with attribution.
  • Implementations — parsers, pricing engines, trading models, back-office — are each implementer's own and stay proprietary. Conformance is about the wire, not the engine.
  • The conformance corpus (conformance/) is part of the specification (CC BY 4.0): language-agnostic JSON cases any implementation MUST pass. The in-repo validator is one runner, not a language oracle (Q40).
  • Reference libraries and extra runners, if published later, carry Apache-2.0 with a royalty-free patent grant, separate from the spec's CC BY licence.

How it's governed (staged)

Modelled on how live-data standards actually reached adoption, not on standards committees:

  1. Gravity play (now). Published openly under one steward, no committee. The value is the vocabulary and the validator being good enough to adopt. This is how GTFS and OpenTelemetry won.
  2. Consortium (later). A lightweight working group only once there are 2–3 non-competing adopters, so the vocabulary reflects more than one house.
  3. Standards body (maybe). A neutral home (or a betting module proposed to an existing body) only if the ecosystem asks for it. An ISO number is an outcome, not a starting move.

Change control

  • Vocabularies and schemas change through CONTRIBUTING.md.
  • Canonical ids are stable: once an id is published it is never re-pointed or reused, only deprecated.
  • Versioning follows VERSIONING.md.
  • 1.0 freeze requires two independent implementations — one producer and one consumer — that are not the in-repo validator (Q41). 0.x minors have no two-implementation gate.

What this is not

  • Not a product, and not affiliated with any existing platform (including any similarly named betting platform). Always written in full as a specification.
  • Not tied to any one provider's ids or internal system. It names none.

Source: GOVERNANCE.md