Will GMT be banned in China like matlab?

GMT is open source software. No license server is in effect, so no.

GMT is open source and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3 or later (though some component are licensed differently, see gmt/LICENSE.TXT at master · GenericMappingTools/gmt · GitHub). Compared to proprietary software like Matlab which is backed by a company, it will be much harder to ‘ban’ GMT since the source code is there to just ‘copy’. That said, don’t expect full customer support since you’re not paying for anything.

You’ll be glad to know that GMT is also available to download from mirrors in different countries including China, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, and three different places in the US. There’s actually an active GMT China Community too! If you’re really worried, just download the source code and compile it yourself, or modify it to your liking, just as long as you share it :smile:

Oh, and for anyone with the resources, we’re open to adding more mirrors around the world, see:

Other continents/countries welcome too. An South America or Oceania mirror would be nice since it isn’t covered yet. I’ll try for an Antarctic one at some point :laughing:

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There ir a mirror in Brazil.

GMT has two different data servers.

  1. A FTP server which contains the GMT source code tarballs, Windows and macOS installers, and GSHHG and DCW dataset. The official URL of the FTP server is ftp://ftp.soest.hawaii.edu/gmt and there are already many mirrors around the world (https://www.generic-mapping-tools.org/download/#mirrors).
  2. A GMT data server, which hosts the GMT remote dataset (e.g., earth relief data, earth day and night images, and earth crustal age data) and cache data. When you run gmt grdimage @earth_relief_01d -pdf map, GMT will automatically download the earth_relief_01d_p.grd file from the GMT data server and save it in your local directory (usually ~/.gmt/server/earth/earth_relief directory). The official URL of the GMT data server is https://oceania.generic-mapping-tools.org (you cannot visit the URL directly in your web browser, but GMT can download data from it). Currently, there is no mirror for this data server (it’s new since GMT 6.0) but we expect to have more.
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I see,Thanks for reply.