MaxMind donates its city database

The drupal blog mentions that:

The company MaxMind.com has agreed to release their cities of the world database under the GPL. The database contains locations by country, city, latitude and longitude. There are over 3,047,000 records in the database.

The database seems to be at http://www.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/.

The MaxMind site also offers FLOSS software free access to their GeoIP database.

As a way of giving back to the Open Source community, we offer a free subscription to GeoIP Country Binary API database updates for use by any widely used Open Source project for the purposes of selecting the closest download mirror. Companies such as Redhat, Mandrake Linux, and IBM that have contributed substantially to the Open Source movement are also eligible.

MaxMind also offers GPLed developer APIs in C, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python to use their database.

It would be interesting to see how creative FLOSS software can get in using such a wealth of geographic data. We should all be thanking MaxMind for their generous contribution to the Opensource world.