If we can't answer important questions like these, we can't start to understand the world we live in. Turbot is a tool to help developers contribute data that can answer questions like these to the public domain. It can be used by anyone with a little programming knowledge.
We believe a corporate map of the world is essential for policy makers, citizens, and businesses. We accept any corporate data that:
Write your bot in one of our supported languages, and add it to our system using turbot, our command line tool.
We will help you improve your bot (if necessary), then schedule the scraping for you. You'll have access to statistics about your data; you'll be able to search it online (along with other contributed data); and can download it again at any time.
All OpenCorporates data is available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), the same licence as OpenStreetMap. This grants you the right to copy, redistribute and alter the data, as long as you attribute OpenCorporates, and licence your derived data under the same terms.
OpenCorporates is built by a small core team, plus a community of data activists.
There are many other providers of corporate data, but none makes their data available under an Open licence. Every tiny piece of data contributed to Open Corporates moves more corporate information into public domain. Every use of a non-open, proprietary system helps keep this data hidden in silos.
Other corporate data websites have huge amounts of venture capital funding, and their exit strategy is all about profit. We are trying to change the world, and we can't win the Open argument without the help of our community.
We believe bring corporate data into the open, and keeping it there, is too important to leave to chance. OpenCorporates must be economically sustainable - we have over 40 servers to run and a small core of staff to pay to keep things ticking over.
We therefore generate income by selling data under a second, non-open licence for private business users who don't want to share their derived databases. However, all our data is guaranteed to be permanently available under the ODbL.