[MikeChristensen]

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.

[bbayer]

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.