Open Source Alternative To Google Earth? 190
aws910 writes "Today, I fired up Google Earth to find that the 'points of interest' category had been removed, and a single checkbox is in its place. Certain layers are now entirely inaccessible. Google triggered a user revolt, but admitted fault, and promised to restore full functionality someday. In the meantime, I've found a lack of plausible alternatives. Bing seems nice, but Moonlight crashes the browser on any machine I use, and I'd rather use OSS anyway ... which made me realize there doesn't seem to be a good open-source alternative to Google Earth. Am I missing something?"
NASA's World Wind (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Licensing? Severs? (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at Marble from the KDE education project - http://edu.kde.org/marble/
KDE Marble (Score:5, Informative)
http://edu.kde.org/marble/ [kde.org]
Marble is a Virtual Globe and World Atlas that you can use to learn more about Earth: You can pan and zoom around and you can look up places and roads. A mouse click on a place label will provide the respective Wikipedia article.
Of course it's also possible to measure distances between locations or watch the current cloud cover. Marble offers different thematic maps: A classroom-style topographic map, a satellite view, street map, earth at night and temperature and precipitation maps. All maps include a custom map key, so it can also be used as an educational tool for use in class-rooms. For educational purposes you can also change date and time and watch how the starry sky and the twilight zone on the map change.
In opposite to other virtual globes Marble also features multiple projections: Choose between a Flat Map ("Plate carré"), Mercator or the Globe.
The best of all: Marble is Free Software / Open Source Software and promotes the usage of free maps. And it's available for all major operating systems (Linux/Unix, MS Windows and Mac OS X).
FSF High priority list (Score:5, Informative)
FSF is actively looking for people to contribute to any such project.
Open Street Maps (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NASA's World Wind (Score:5, Informative)
World Wind is probably the best - there are two versions, C# and Java. C# is more mature, Java version is catching up.
You can define your own texture/icon layers and with some work also display your own elevation data and 3D models. There are many layers already, such as OpenStreetMap. KML support is in early stages.
Re:NASA's World Wind (Score:1, Informative)
Since Wikipedia is down round these parts, here's the actual site:
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
Re:Open Street Maps (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Licensing? Severs? (Score:3, Informative)
For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity. It is mostly used to provide a tool for commercial applications of the Google maps data. For example, if you've seen a movie that did the zoom-in or -out between the globe from space and a single house, everything from 100 feet up and further was probably Google Earth. It's also used by law enforcement, NGOs planning access routes to remote locations, real estate, site surveys, etc. See their business use cases for Google Earth [google.com] for more info.
Re:NASA's World Wind (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Licensing? Severs? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm trying to find out what exactly Google Earth is actually useful for??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system [wikipedia.org]
I have a cousin who works for the top GIS company and when Google started doing the satellite view on Google Maps and then released Google Earth, there was a collective "ah shit!" from the industry because Google was giving away their bread and butter for free.
We take it for granted, but before Google, you mostly had to pay top dollar for a dataset overlaid onto a satellite map because there were no real non-commercial alternatives.
Google has already fixed it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NASA's World Wind (Score:3, Informative)
As one bonus, World Wind does not limit the size of your local imagery cache; you can assign as many gigabytes as you want. World Wind (Windows version) and a selection of cache packs (Landsat and SRTM) can be downloaded from http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22world%20wind%22 [archive.org], while the Java version can be downloaded from http://builds.worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/download.asp [nasa.gov]
Re:Odd .... (Score:2, Informative)
...lead to an .NET version which has been poorly implemented in Java.
Uhhh, what? Did you purposely skip over the C# versions, or are you just blind?
While C# itself isn't open source, it is free as in beer, and software made in C# certainly can be open source. Most people aren't re-writing their compilers just to code an app, and it's available in both Windows and Linux, so I really don't see how your complaint has any merit at all. Unless you're just a .Net hater for fun, which is dumb. .Net works great and takes a huge load off the programmer's shoulders.
What's your problem man?
Re:Licensing? Severs? (Score:1, Informative)
OSSIMplanet, pTolemy3D, Virtual Ocean and more (Score:5, Informative)
NASA World Wind is the most popular afaik, but there are others, including OSSIMplanet [ossim.org], pTolemy3D [ptolemy3d.org], Virtual Ocean [virtualocean.org] and quite a few other ones [delicious.com] depending on your requirements.
Re:NASA's World Wind (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Licensing? Severs? (Score:5, Informative)
Just one ingredient (Score:4, Informative)
As well as the shiny interface, what makes Google is oodles of current, hi-res imagery and enough grunt to make the same base set of data available to a large chunk of the world's population.
Taken as a complete product, I can't see anything remotely in the ballpark. FOSS can do software, but data and servers to cough it up is not a software issue. Bing has data, but from what I've seen their data currecny and resolution is trailing Google. Due to the economies of scale involved, catching up would probably need deep pockets.
Xix.
Re:NASA's World Wind (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not sure why any of that matters in this discussion, though.