Some Data Released in UK

Steve McIntyre reports that “the UK Met Office has released a large tranche of station data, together with code”.

Notes:

• The Met Office says that this is not a complete set of data, but it is unclear what is missing.
• This is the processed data - the raw data is claimed to have been deleted.
• Over at The Air Vent, Jeff Id discusses some of the details.

In my recent discussions (1, 2) of open climate science, I have stressed the importance of understanding licensing terms when discussing specific code or data. In this case there appears to be no license info available for the data (Note: you can not assert a copyright on facts, e.g. raw data, but given that this is processed data it can have a copyright and license. The Met also seems to believe this, as it is their excuse for not releasing other parts of the complete data set).

On the code side, there are two files of perl code which are downloadable from the site (1, 2). The site says:

This code is released under an Open Source licence that is contained as comments in the code. By running the code you indicate your acceptance of the licence.

However, there is no license in the comments of either file. As those of us in software know, there are big differences between open source licenses, so it would be good do know what license they were planning to use.