MaxMind, the company that maintains the GeoLite2 databases, has decided to change the license of their databases [0]. Previously they were available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license [1]. My understanding of the situation is that the databases are now distributed under a custom license that requires a user to agree to terms to obtain a license key in order to download the databases [2]. Their blog post states that redistribution is permitted, but I don't see any mention of redistribution in the new license. I have updated the Fedora packages to the December 2019 version of the databases, which are still available under CC-BY-SA. I would like Fedora Legal's advice on what should happen to this package in the future. Here are the scenarios I can imagine. 1. Keep the Fedora packages but never update them again, since future updates to the databases will be released under a non-approved license. 2. Retire the packages. Nothing has a hard requirement on them. ipcalc, php-maxmind-db-reader, and php-maxminddb recommend one at least one of the geolite2-* subpackages. The geoipupdate tool is capable of downloading the databases when provided with a license key, but having the databases available as packages is beneficial so users can have the databases updated with their normal system updates rather than a dedicated tool. 3. Seek Fedora Legal's approval of the new license [2] in order to keep the packages updated. In this scenario I'm not clear who would be agreeing to the license terms. I'm not sure if I as an individual can agree to the terms for all of Fedora. This package also exists in RHEL 8, so if Red Hat were to establish a MaxMind account for RHEL, it would be nice to be able to use the same account for Fedora as well. [0]: https://blog.maxmind.com/2019/12/18/significant-changes-to-accessing-and-using-geolite2-databases/ [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20191206115318/https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/#License [2]: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite2/eula
Sadly, the new GeoLite2 license is non-free and not permissible in Fedora. The December 2019 version of the databases which is clearly CC-BY-SA (and thus, permissible) can stay as long as you wish. In your three option scenarios, I can only eliminate #3. The choice of #1 or #2 is up to you, though, I would strongly advise you to engage in a deeper discussion with the Fedora community (especially affected maintainers) before making any change.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 32 development cycle. Changing version to 32.
Since this is content and not code, I don't see an issue in keeping this around in Fedora. I added a note in the spec file to warn any future packagers that may be considering updating it. https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/geolite2/c/a92eaebc21a1d71e0fae9339b05e0f4b0ae27280
Maybe you could add a README.md in git too with the same information, which would then show up at https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/geolite2
Good idea, done. https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/geolite2/c/a97bc6dc97c70c0ff43bbfc6d5a6158915d3646b
Maybe we could look at packaging the DB-IP Lite database, which has Creative Commons Attributions 4 International License and also supports MMDB format. https://db-ip.com/db/lite.php