Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open Source Alternative To Google Earth?

Posted by timothy on from the you-are-where dept.

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?"

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Licensing? Severs? by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Who's going to pay to license all those satellite images? Who's going to run the servers and pay for all the bandwidth consumed by such an application?

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  2. Open Geospatial Consortium by robkill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google Earth is essentially a Web Map Server (WMS) The OGC http://www.opengeospatial.org/ has all the specifications for Web Map Severs and Clients. As others have mentioned, NASA WorldWind is a good example.

    A blog to follow would be http://freegeographytools.com/

    --
    DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
  3. Re:Licensing? Severs? by turgid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sounds just like what people were saying about Microsoft in the early 1990s.

    Microsoft is dead. Google is the new Microsoft.

    --
    Stick Men