Slashgeo

The Ogle Earth blog indicates that if you use Google Earth at work (the free version), you're in illegality. From the site: "1. USE OF SOFTWARE The Software is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties."

Bull's Ramble blog tells us NASA World Wind Java (version 1.5) will stay in close development. From the blog: "We were all kind of expecting this, but personally I think NASA is shooting itself in the foot. I know of quite a few very skilled coders waiting for World Wind Java to start contributing code [...]"

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.""

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!"

I'm still surprised at how many people don't know they can't legally install Google Earth Free or Plus in a work environment. This made me wonder, can someone or a competing organization (choose the one you want, there's plenty of competitors to Google Earth!) could enforce Google Earth's license? Update: 09/06 11:02 GMT by S : Great news, The Google Earth blog (see comment below) informs us anybody can now use the new Google Earth Free in a work environment for internal use.

The Earth is Square informs us NASA World Wind Java SDK 0.3 has been released. This Pat Murris blog entry provides numerous screenshots and an analysis of what's new. The Bull's Rambles blog reminds us this is truly a cross-platform virtual globe and links to the Java webstart app. Amongst the changes from EiS: "# - Memory cache refactoring and optimization # - Reimplementation of Polylines. Polylines on surface. # - Shape and icon dragging # - Math classes re-engineering # - WMS capabilities doc parsing # - Texture cache # - Proxy support # - Anaglyph stereo "

The Earth is Square let us know NASA World Wind 0.4.1 has been released. A few days ago he also detailed the Moon and Mars layers for NWWJava. From the 0.4.1 announcement: "The World Wind Java SDK alpha 4 - version 0.4.1 is available. Download WWJ SDK 0.4 (Zip 6.5M) or try the java web start demo 0.4 from the NASA World Wind site. [...] WorldWind Java SDK home pages at NASA Learning Technologies and WorldWind Central." As usual, I copied related stories below.