[jamesbfb]

And they've made it even more difficult over the past few years. I had written a script that would scrape BoM's page and send the up-to-date conditions via MQTT but it stopped working a few years ago. IRIC, even changing the HTTP headers/user-agent prevented it from ever working again. That said, I understand it's absolutely their prerogative and they have a right to make money from the data.

[markdown]

> they have a right to make money from the data.

I thought it was a govt service. BOM is private?

[zinekeller]

You'll be surprised that the free-for-all-no-questions-asked US system is not the one followed around the world. Australia, like other countries with significant British history, has the concept of Crown Copyrights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Australia). Whether it's the (UK) Met Office (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/met-office-data-f...), (Australian) BoM (https://reg.bom.gov.au/business-solutions/) or (NZ) MetService (https://metraweather.com/), commercial use is paid-for. Personal use is implied to be free, but usually they interpret using their API to be commercial use.

[thejosh]

That being said, and I agree with all points you raised, the Australian Gov has been fantastic over the last few years of focusing on open data, to give credit where it's due.

https://data.gov.au/search

Their datasets are great!

G-NAF for example: https://data.gov.au/dataset/ds-dga-19432f89-dc3a-4ef3-b943-5...

[zinekeller]

To be fair, from looking at the available datasets of different countries, it seems that weather data tends to be the one requiring business-level licensing. There are exceptions like Norway's Met (https://api.met.no/) and US' NOAA (too many to list), but unfortunately the usual answer for "weather data?" is "pay first".

[Humphrey]

Totally, there are full 3d scans of Launceston available. It's amazing what data you can access!

[andylynch]

Quite correct- though the UK Met Office has a specific non-commercial API in DataPoint which is pretty good.

[zinekeller]

Oh, didn't knew about that despite checking out their website, but reviewing the licence you're correct in saying that commercial use requires payment.