Hi Jonas,
That is a good question, and I’m afraid that I don’t have a definitive answer.
I am not a lawyer.
Essentially, the data comes from multiple sources and is not something that I
hold the copyright to, so I don’t believe I am in a position to apply a license
or say anything about permission for further re-distribution. To the best of my
knowledge, permission has been granted for them to be distributed with MATPOWER
and I personally don’t have an issue with them being re-distributed in other
forms, but I suppose the definitive answer can only be given by the one who was
the original source of the data, which is different for each case.
Sorry there isn’t a cleaner answer to this.
Ray
> On Jan 22, 2015, at 12:33 PM, Jonas Kersulis <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I know I am allowed to use and modify MATPOWER according to the GPL, but can
> I redistribute the transmission network data included with MATPOWER?
>
> I have been emulating some of MATPOWER's functionality in Julia, the language
> I use for my research. One piece of functionality I rely on is loadcase(). To
> implement this in Julia, I stored all MATPOWER case file data into a set of
> .mat files and wrote a Julia function to interface with them. Now I can type
> loadcase("case14") in Julia to return the exact same data as when I run
> loadcase(case14) with MATPOWER.
>
> I would like to distribute my Julia package on GitHub, but it includes
> MATPOWER's case file data, so I want to make sure I am following the license.
> My question is about this part of the MATPOWER license:
> "The MATPOWER case files distributed with MATPOWER are not covered by the
> GPL. In most cases, the data has either been included with permission or has
> been converted from data available from a public source."
> Does this mean I am not permitted to distribute .mat files generated from
> MATPOWER's case format files? If I need permission to distribute MATPOWER's
> transmission network data along with my Julia code, who should I ask?
> Best,
> Jonas Kersulis
> PhD Student, University of Michigan
