Just a quick note: I will not again enter any ideological debates here.
First off, I think this is a non-issue regardless of which license we use. This is first and foremost a scientific study, and the dataset we’re producing is more of a byproduct—its main purpose is to help other researchers verify our findings. It seems like there might be some misconceptions about this dataset: Think of it as a table of answer codes. It is not a text dataset and therefore not interesting or useful for LLM training (or similar).
Second, we made this decision because the survey doesn’t have any funding and relies on people generously sharing their opinions (without compensation). Given the growing skepticism around data collection, we wanted to be especially careful not to discourage users from participating. Our primary goal is to conduct a study with a population as diverse as possible, and we did not want to lose potential participants who might be less inclined to give away their data without compensation.
