Gaia Project Agrees To Google Cease and Desist 323
Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's 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."
What is the hoohah about? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes - Google Earth is nothing without the data. That's why they pay huge sums of money for that data. They intend to make a return on this investment - and I'm sure anybody with Google shares would expect them to do so.
To make a return they want people to use it. To get more people to use it they developed an API - the usage of which they intend to ultimately bring money back to Google with.
Why on earth would they want other people ripping off the data they paid to license to do other stuff with - something that doesn't return them money. More importantly, whoever is licensing them the data isn't going to be too happy that other people are copying it without paying them a license fee. If I wrote some software and sold copies to people, and one of my customers started burning copies and giving them out to everybody, I would be pissed off with that customer.
If Gaia wants to use the maps, I'm sure the OSS community will collectively reach into their pockets to pay for the licensing fee required (that would be the fee required to distribute those maps free, to anybody). Alternatively, why don't we send up an OSS satellite ourselves and take our own photos?
I fail to see how this is a story..
Re:But what if... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:google should have turned a blind eye. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm on the Google Earth team and yes, this is exactly what happened. The license we have to the imagery forbids us from allowing access from unofficial clients. The data providers take this very seriously indeed and noticed very quickly that such an application was out in the wild.
Fortunately, the Gaia author understood our position and ceased development, for which we are grateful. I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and make up for it. It's a small gesture but we don't want him to think badly of us.
I guess some people will see this action as us dumping on the little guy, but it's not that simple. Many Googlers have a background in open source and have been on both sides of the fence. However, the fact remains that this sort of aerial imagery is not only very expensive to produce but also very expensive to manipulate and merge into a unified "Earth". If we allowed open source clients to access the Earth database it would be easier to dump the (unwatermarked) images en-masse and avoid paying the imagery owners for it. Clearly, that's not something anybody wants - satellites don't launch themselves.
Re:Open Dependencies (Score:3, Informative)
To clarify, we have not asked the Gaia authors to stop developing the program, only to stop accessing Google Earths database. Once the author has pulled the GE download code, he is free to retarget it to say the NASA World Wind imagery and carry on, we have no problems with that.
From TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, they got a license for the images, data, whatever only for use in their software. The original providers of that data would - understandably - be unhappy if they allowed the data to be used by other products (remember, they want to keep selling the data to people). So Google has to be the "bad guy" and pull the plug from the 3rd party devs or the data providers will sue them for allowing others to take the data and/or pull the plug on Google's license.
Gaia's speed, and FreeBSD too (Score:3, Informative)
I have google earth installed on a windows box and play with it from time to time. But (granted that box is older and more limited than the FreeBSD box -- though it does have a much better video card in it) it runs pretty distressing slow... chews up the system resources. Gaia on my freebsd box was *fast*. Amazingly fast. And therefore fun! Sure I didn't have any UI to speak of, could not look up addresses or landmarks... but i was soon zooming in to any place i was interested in and finding my own way around, and having more fun doing it in the fast minimal interface than I ever had in google earth.
Also it was so nice to see in native 64 freebsd bits... i don't think I'll ever see Google's offerings come to my platform of choice
Alas, the very next day I see the news about the take down....
Sigh.
Buy a GPS, write some standards (Score:3, Informative)
GE is neat but the main innovation it offers is ready access to large volume of base data.
Xix.