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Gaia Reverse Engineered Google Earth Stopped

posted by Satri on Monday November 27, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the do-no-evil dept.
Law Google Open Source Community Virtual Globe
Several sources discuss the letter from Google's CTO to stop Gaia, an opensource project, to develop a 3D API to Google Earth. You can read a lot on The Earth is Square and on Ogle Earth. The Slashdot summary: ""Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth , has decided to comply with a request from Google. Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, (likely to have turned into a demand), affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner.""

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Webmapping API Licenses and Data Access 2 comments [+]
All Points Blog offers an clear and to-the-point entry on the relationship between data and API licenses for webmapping apps, specifically Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! data into other webmapping apps such as OpenLayers. Meanwhile, The Earth is Square wonders if a workaround could revive a NASA World Wind plugin to access Google Maps data. From APB: "I had in my head that somehow OpenLayers was "doing something wrong" since it could pull in data sets from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MultiMap into its own interface (go play with that!). With quite a bit of patience Frank explained that OpenLayer is doing everything correctly. It has an API key for each of the API providers (if needed) and follows all the rules of the license. So, how is this different from the Gaia team noted above that got shut down? That group was accessing the data directly from Google servers and not, as stipulated in the license, via Google software. (Google Earth has no API like Google Maps does.) Frank even showed me the code where OpenLayers dutifully uses its API key to pull in tiles from Google Maps. Google, he noted, even contacted the MetaCarta team to ask if there was any thing needed to further their implementation!"
NASA World Wind License Explained [+]
Because you can't legally install Google Earth (Free or Plus) at work, virtual globes licenses are important. The Earth is Square shares info from Patrick Hogan, the NWW project manager explaining the NASA World Wind licenses. From the post: "Patrick Hogan [the NASA World Wind project manager] has stepped up and posted this to the mailing list as an explanation to the licensing and how they all interact [...] Rather than try to decipher each of the issues expressed regarding the World Wind (WW) license, it should be clearly stated that NASA World Wind.NET and NASA World Wind Java, under the NASA Open Source Agreement (NOSA) license, allow for anyone to make 'changes to the core' and redistribute. This 'core' will necessarily fall under the NOSA. But, this *does not restrict* the ability for third-parties to combine the World Wind core with their proprietary extensions or applications that leverage this core."
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