[enriquto]

The ESA is just as open as nasa, and the freely available Copernicus images benefit US citizens as well. This pissing contest that you try to start is ridiculous. Americans and Europeans are very happy with each other in this regard.

[AlbertoGP]

I’m sorry I wasn’t clear: the last paragraph quoting the current conditions for using the VIIRS Nightfire data, where as you correctly note the conditions of use are similar, is a change that happened afterwards. I should have written “Meanwhile in USA, things have changed: ...”.

During the years when I worked on the Oil Spill Monitor and Gas Flare tracker, from 2013 to 2019, NOAA gave the data completely without conditions: anyone could go to the Suomi-NPP website and just download the CSV files without login or anything else, and not just the current one (the satellite does one pass per night over the whole world) but also historic data.

Now things have converged, and your statement that "ESA is just as open as NASA" is, at least when comparing the Sentinel vs. the VIIRS Nighfire data, absolutely correct.