Postal Codes Dataset for Saudi Arabia, SA

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Postal Codes Dataset for Saudi Arabia, SA including name of the city, town, or place, various administrative divisions and alternative city names.

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About this dataset

Saudi Arabia (SA) — internal licensing notes

Status: NOT CLEAR TO SELL OR FREELY REDISTRIBUTE. Recommend withdrawal. Not rebuilt, not fixed — this file records the analysis behind that call.

The problem (per datahub-next#941 §1.4, opened 2026-08-08)

Two independent problems, the second worse than the first:

  1. GPL-2.0 copyleft. The current backbone is sourced from a GitHub repo licensed GPL-2.0. §2(b) requires the whole derived work to be licensed "as a whole at no charge to all third parties." Selling is allowed (§1), but exclusivity dies — the first buyer may lawfully republish it for free. §6 makes a no-redistribution EULA a breach; §4 terminates immediately on breach, no cure period.
    • This problem alone would NOT block free redistribution — giving it away under proper GPL terms is exactly what GPL contemplates. It only blocks selling it as an exclusive/controlled product.
  2. Chain of title (independent, worse). The upstream repo states its data was "collected from https://maps.address.gov.sa/". A third party cannot GPL data it does not own. If that Saudi government portal has no open licence, the GPL notice on top of it is a nullity — we have no valid permission of any kind, paid or free.

This second problem is why free redistribution does not fix anything. Price is irrelevant to whether we have a right to distribute the data at all.

What I checked before recommending withdrawal (2026-08-21)

The issue's own proposed fix was: "Rebuild from GeoNames SA (CC BY 4.0) or licence from Saudi Post / SPL." I checked whether the GeoNames option is actually real:

curl -sL https://download.geonames.org/export/zip/SA.zip
-> HTTP 404 (returns an HTML "Not Found" page, not a zip)

Confirmed against the full GeoNames postal export directory listing: it goes ...SE.zip, SG.zip, SI.zip, SJ.zip, SK.zip, SM.zip... — no SA.zip at all. Their own readme says: "Supported countries: nearly 100 countries are currently supported. New countries are added when the national postal service starts publishing data under a compatible license." Saudi Arabia is not one of them — and unlike Chile/Ireland/Malta/China/Argentina/Brazil (each of which GeoNames explicitly lists as partially included "for copyright reasons"), Saudi Arabia isn't even a partial-coverage case. It's absent entirely.

So the GeoNames rebuild path the issue proposed does not exist. The only remaining option is licensing directly from Saudi Post / SPL — a commercial negotiation, not something to execute unilaterally.

Decision

Withdraw from sale. No rebuild source is available. The chain-of-title defect means continued distribution — at any price, including free — carries open exposure until either (a) Saudi Post/SPL licenses the data directly, or (b) counsel confirms maps.address.gov.sa actually carries an open licence the GPL notice could legitimately have been built on.

Also unresolved per the issue: "the admin backbone source is also flagged GPL-2.0 in our own notes — confirm which repo was actually used." Not investigated as part of this note.

This is a research summary of licence texts and public source availability, not legal advice. The chain-of-title question specifically should go to counsel before any final action, per the issue's own framing.

Source: datahub-next#941 (opened by @anuveyatsu, 2026-08-08); GeoNames availability check performed directly, 2026-08-21.