This is a tough question, which I don't have an answer to without throwing out "IANAL" type acronyms. The recipes I've collected were crawled from several different major recipe websites. I think my website database has somewhere around 50,000. Not only would a sample database with that many recipes be huge, it also made me uncomfortable to include content scraped from AllRecipes, Food.com, Epicurious, etc in an MIT licensed open source project. Do I have the rights to even do this? Are there copyright issues involved? Who knows. The best approach, at least for now, was to include a couple dozen hand-picked sample recipes (which I got from friends and family) as a starting point. After all, I'm open sourcing technology I built, not recipe content I did not create.
I totally understood your point. Besides a project can have several aspects. Somebody can have interest over your algorithms, others can have interest over your processed data. On the other hand, I don't think recipes are copyrighted. Actually I am not an expert on this matter but most of time, also you might realize that famous sites use copy-pasted or slightly changed materials. Inventing a recipe usually is not a case.
If someone can enlighten us on this subject, I will be really appreciated.
It's basically sample data. I hand picked about 30 recipes from my database, at least one from each category. The sample shopping lists, menus, and favorites also use those recipes. Not enough to build a massive recipe website with, but enough to get you started.
Yes - very straight forward answer to that: I did a lot of interviews with potential customers, and it was a deal breaker for virtually all of them. Basically, no one was foolish enough to build a startup that depends on a service which may or may not stay up and running, or go out of business and disappear completely.
