opened 09:18PM - 22 Dec 19 UTC
closed 02:56AM - 16 Jan 20 UTC
Major
see https://blog.maxmind.com/2019/12/18/significant-changes-to-accessing-and-usi…ng-geolite2-databases/
* This is valid from December 30, 2019 even though it was only announced two days ago (and that during the season where most developers are on holidays)
* One can't simply download the free GeoIP databases anymore, instead one has to register an account
* The file is still free of charge
* But they also use this change to sneakily change the license of the database from the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike to their own end-user license agreement
* This end-user license agreement is not even available yet, but they are estimating they will publish it on December 23.
* They reason that they need to collect the user data of all of their users to comply to privacy laws (especially the new Californian one).
* What does this mean for Matomo:
The normal GeoIP setup will stop working for new users in a week. For existing Matomo users it will continue to work, but will get out of data.
* What they don't mention: They can't relicense the existing files, so we can continue to distribute the last database before the change (even though it will become out of date and distributing it might be a challenge)
I reckon as a first step we could temporarily host the latest version of the DB on builds.matomo.org so at least existing downloads won't fail?
Then start implementing an alternative asap? Like eg https://db-ip.com/db/download/ip-to-city-lite
Are there any other suggestions?