Clarification on the purpose of the API license?

In the Swagger 2.0 specification, there is support for adding a License as one of the informational fields and the description for this is License information for the exposed API.

This seems a bit ambiguous, since a license could potentially be understood to apply to one or more of the following contexts:

1. Use of the API. This situation seems to be already handled by the termsOfService section though.
2. Data retrieved from the API
3. The specification JSON/YAML for the API indeed, there is a license for the Swagger 2 specification
4. Client/server code generated via swagger-codegen could some licenses theoretically extend to that?

I am guessing that the item 3 is the intended use for the license field, but I will admit that at first I thought it was meant for the first case and I could not see how a license would actually apply. Is it possible to get some clarification of how licenses should be picked here and where they do and do not apply?

[adulau]

I would like to reopen this because it’s still very unclear in the specification of what is exactly the license coverage:

• The data exposed via the API
• The API design (which I doubt as this is clearly not original enough to be covered by copyright)
• The back-end software of the API

Is there an archive somewhere where the license field has been added and the reasoning behind?

[StephanBijzitter]

I second this question. I’m creating a definition for an internal api that third parties (customers of ours) can get access to to manage their accounts/information. The code itself is never exposed; only the swagger .json file is loaded and that’s really it. What’s a license got to do with that?