On Sat, Jan 04, 2020 at 12:44:49AM +0100, Patrick Matthäi wrote: > So if we are not allowed to distribute it anymore we have got the > following options: > > 1) we keep the the current free database in our repository, which is > free and works. We dont care about the precision after X years (not our > fault)
That would be (very) misleading and I'm not sure if it would be in the service of our users. The data gets stale really quick --I think it was something like 2-5% loss per month? My opinion is that shipping no data is better than shipping garbage data... > 2) we drop the database package. Also if it is something like contrib, > but if there is no free working alternative, shouldnt we (as in Debian > as open source community) then also remove all libraries and > implementations using GeoIP from Maxmind from our repositories? I don't agree with that; the libraries are free-libre, the file format is open and freely documented (CC-BY-SA 3.0), and there are both readers and writers for those formats in the archive. There are even free-as-in-beer databases available in the wild, although that wouldn't even be a requirement IMO. There is nothing in the DFSG that says that software is free-libre only if it operates on publicly available free-libre data. > 3) We/others/I and others start a fork: I would welcome volunters to > start a fork to maintain the database, so that it is not useless in a > few years, but this is also one of my last options. I would like to have > a solution with Maxmind together. I wouldn't mind that option of course, but I have my doubts it'd be successful... That's essentially MaxMind's entire business that you'd be trying to replicate, after all :) How about option (4): - We drop geoip-database, assuming that we determine we can't legally distribute it anymore, or ship it in non-free if we determine we can. [I haven't read the terms yet] - We let users generate and/or ship their own MMDBs. For example, organizations may have internal data in their databases of sufficient accuracy that they can use to generate MMDBs and use them locally. - Optionally, users can also use geoipupdate, which is already in Debian (and in contrib). They can sign up on maxmind.com, for either a free or paid account, configure geoiupdate with their username & license key and get fresh and up-to-date databases. They can continue to use all MMDB/GeoIP2 software as they previously did. Definitely not as easy to set up or practical as the previous situation, but still better than options 1-3 I think :) > So @Maxmind: > > <snip> My intepretation of the change is very different than yours, but I'll avoid speaking for MaxMind folks here :) Regards, Faidon