Commercial licensing question: using RELEASE texts in a subscription-funded research platform

[miyabguu]

Assalamu alaykum, and thank you for OpenITI — the corpus is the reason a
project like mine is possible at all.

I am writing about the licence rather than about access, and I would rather
ask than interpret a clause in my own favour.

What I am building

ATHAR is an evidence-first Islamic research platform. Its single rule is that
every transmitted statement must be traceable to its source — the work, the
edition, the page — and that no statement may be attributed to a scholar unless
that attribution can be shown. It does not issue rulings and does not generate
religious content; it retrieves passages and shows them with their provenance.

I have ingested a portion of RELEASE (currently ~2.4M passages across ~2,470
works) into a retrieval index, and I have not published or redistributed the
corpus itself.

The question

RELEASE is published on Zenodo under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The platform is
currently free, but it is intended to carry a paid subscription that covers its
running costs (servers and text processing). As I read the NC clause, that
places the intended use outside it.

So, concretely:

1. Would you grant a commercial licence for RELEASE texts used this way?

2. If a full commercial licence is not something you would give, would a
   narrower permission be possible — limited to:

   • retrieval and display of passages, with attribution to OpenITI and to each
     text's own provenance identifiers, and
   • no redistribution of the corpus or of any derived corpus?

3. How should ShareAlike be applied to a search index? A retrieval index
   over the texts is arguably a derivative database. I would like to handle
   this correctly rather than assume it does not apply, and I am open to
   releasing the derived index under the same terms if that is what SA
   requires here.

One thing I should say plainly

I am aware that the version identifiers in RELEASE (Shamela*, JK*,
Masaha*) point to upstream sources whose rights OpenITI does not itself hold.
If, in your view, a commercial licence is not yours to grant for those texts,
please say so. That answer is far more useful to me than a permissive one I
could not rely on — and it would tell me to re-derive those works from
public-domain printings instead, which is the alternative I am already
preparing.

What I commit to either way

• Texts are not altered; no abridgement that changes meaning.
• Attribution to OpenITI shown with the passage itself, not on a credits page.
• No claim of authorship; nothing is presented as produced by software.
• No resale of the corpus and no sublicensing.
• No use of the texts to train any model — retrieval, display and citation only.
• Removal on request, without argument.

I will not proceed with the commercial tier on RELEASE-derived material until
I have an answer here.

Thank you for your time, and for the work itself.

Mine
minedodo999@gmail.com