[Kstars-devel] Re: Poor quality of data in kstars main catalog?

[Akarsh Simha]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 09:32:58PM +0400, Alexey Khudyakov wrote:
> On 10.04.2011 21:12, Akarsh Simha wrote:
> > Deep Sky Objects are in general inaccurate in KStars. Do you have any
> > suggestions for a standard Deep Sky catalog that is accurate and free
> > (as in distributable under terms of the GNU General Public License)?
> >
> IANAL but any free license should suffice. Catalogs are separate 
> entities from kstars and not bound to be GPL, nor even GPL compatible 
> (I.m not sure about last statement)

Well, from what I understand, yes, you any license will work as long
as it is as free as the GPL. This also means that you should be able
to use the application and hence the catalog for commercial purposes.

There are many catalogs that explicitly specify "Free for
Non-commercial use only". Those, IIUC, do not pass. The typical
treatment for those is to put them as additional downloads. I think
that is the reason why the Steinicke NGC catalog, which is more
accurate, is available for download.