As of April 1, 2018, updated versions of the GeoLite Legacy databases will be available to redistribution license customers only, although anyone can continue to download the March 2018 GeoLite Legacy builds. On January 2, 2019, the last build will be removed from our website. GeoLite Legacy database users will need to switch to the GeoLite2 or commercial GeoIP databases and update their integrations by January 2, 2019.
If you are a redistribution license customer, please note that you must download via the account portal or geoipupdate in order to get an updated database.
For more information, please visit our Support Center.
In addition, in 2019, latitude and longitude coordinates in the GeoLite2 databases will be removed.*
- GeoLite2 databases are free IP geolocation databases comparable to, but less accurate than, MaxMind’s GeoIP2 databases. Latitude and longitude coordinates will continue to be provided in GeoIP2 databases. Please check back for updates.
Here’s their blog post from Jan 2018:
Free and open source code has been part of MaxMind’s technical and organizational foundation since our earliest days. As we continue to develop new products to better service our customers with a broader range of diverse and innovative offerings, we occasionally find it necessary to discontinue or phase out some of our products or services.
Accordingly, we have decided to discontinue the GeoLite Legacy databases on January 2, 2019. (Note that we will begin by discontinuing updates to the free GeoLite Legacy databases as of April 1, 2018. For info, see the “Important dates to consider” section.)
I wonder if this is in part from the competitive pressure of people like ipinfo who originally took the maxmind database and then added an API and charged for it:
Originally our API used MaxMind data, but we’ve been very busy working on creating our own geolocation data. We’ve made a lot of progress, and we now use our own data to service around half of all requests. We do still fallback to MaxMind data though, which requires us to state:
This product includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com.
Later this year we hope to exclusively be using our own proprietary geolocation data, which will be more accurate that the MaxMind data, and updated much more frequently. We currently update our geolocation data at least once a month, and up to once a week.