> Not trying to be a smart ass here. But the ADC FAQ talks about the ADC
> data, that is, that produced by the NASA Astronomical Data Center. 
>
No, the ADC doesn't produce any data itself, it's simply a repository of 
existing catalogs and other data tables.   Therefore the phrase "ADC data" 
must be understood as "data available from the ADC", including the Hipparcos 
catalog and the SAO catalog.  Neither of these catalogs' ReadMe files says 
anything about how the data are licensed, so according to the FAQ, they are 
public domain.

> Following Jason's reasoning it would seem that the ADC "public-domain"
> license would apply also to the Hipparcos star data catalogue, developed by
> the ESA 
Indeed.

> (which is not even in the same country) 
So?

> and this is hardly the case. 
> Miguel Coca (spacechart's upstream maintainer) contacted the ESA
> people and they did say that he was free to use this catalogue in
> spacechart, redistribute it and modify it, but they did not mention it was
> in the public domain (please see spacechart's debian/copyright file for
> more information on this).
>
I don't see how you've demonstrated that it isn't public domain.  Where is 
spacechart's debian/copyright file?  I downloaded the spacechart tarball, but 
it wasn't there.  It just seems like the people publishing scientific data 
care a lot less about licensing issues than the average GNU/Linux developer, 
so they just say "sure, use it for whatever, go ahead and redistribute, 
whatever".  Since you don't explicitly hear the phrase "public domain" you 
interpret this as being still proprietary somehow.

> I do not think ADC's FAQ applies to the SAO data. 
I hope I have convinced you by now.

> ADC will no longer exist
> in some time, it's replacement's (such as the French Vizier [1]) does not
> say catalogues are in the public domain.
>
Yes, the CDS says even less about usage than ADC does, which was not a heck of 
a lot.  I really think this is simply because the people publishing the big 
astro catalogs don't know and/or care much about the licensing issues that we 
are (apparently) so passionate about.  In any case, I have sent off several 
direct emails to people at SAO, CDS, and ADC (including my ex-officemate who 
is now at CDS), so we'll see what they say.  

Jason
-- 
KStars:  A K Desktop Planetarium
http://edu.kde.org/kstars
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