Hi,
Many thanks for sharing this, I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. It’s crazy that they share this during christmas holidays with only a weeks notice.
So what does this mean:
- 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
- Even crazier: This end-user license agreement is not even available yet, but they are estimating they will publish it on December 23.
- Same for the Login access. Accounts can also only be generated after December 23
- And the worst of all: 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the existing files, so we can continue to distribute the last database before the change (even though it will become out of date and distributing it might be a challenge)