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Comment by a_square_peg | Hacker News Reader

BoM actually makes it quite difficult to obtain data. I looked into it once and thought it wasn't worth the trouble. Some agencies make it easier than others to obtain the raw data as it's sort of part of their mandates.

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I wish they used better open licensing. The public ftp has great free products, including fire danger ratings and observations, but the licensing mentions “Users intending to publish Bureau data should do so as Registered Users.” This costs a couple of grand and removes the barrier to a lot of potential great community apps being built.

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.

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

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

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.

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...

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".

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

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

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.

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