Replace Highcharts

[hazelshapiro]

Sandy shared information about the Benefit Tool at a partnership meeting that included some developers.

• The good news: The session was a smash success. Super high level of interest. 🎉
• The question: A developer did follow up with some interest but in looking at our GitHub he said one of the pieces of code that we're using is not open source but requires a small site license. @MattF-NSIDC I'm wondering if you could clarify this (no rush) - Sandy and I don't understand the implications here.

Sorry, 'bug fixes' may not be the best place for this, just want to be sure it's captured somewhere

[mfisher87]

An excellent observation. Last I checked, I believe it was when starting the prototype, Highcharts permitted non-commercial use without applying for a license, but that seems to have changed since then. I don't know if this applies to the version we're currently running or not, but my guess is the changed license applies retroactively or something. The only non-commercial free license option is now an "Educational license" which requires us to apply and lasts 1 year. We should move off of this software IMO.

Highcharts is only used for rendering the Sankey diagrams, so replacing it won't touch very much code.

[hazelshapiro]

Thanks for this - very clear and now it does belong in the bugs category!

[mfisher87]

We got a new site license for Highcharts covering usaon.org and nsidc.org, so this is not as urgent anymore