Open Source Alternative To Google Earth?

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?"

Comments

NASA's World Wind

[eldavojohn]

World Wind is licensed under NASA's Open Source license. Not sure of the intricacies with it (IANAL) but was developed with the open source community.

Re:NASA's World Wind

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Licensing? Severs?

[Hatta]

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?

Re:Licensing? Severs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Marble from the KDE education project - http://edu.kde.org/marble/

KDE Marble

[IYagami]

http://edu.kde.org/marble/

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).

Steven Wright

[XxtraLarGe]

I have a map of the United States...actual size. It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile." I spent last summer folding it. I also have a full-size map of the world. I hardly ever unroll it.

Re:Steven Wright

[martin-boundary]

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you can't unroll a fullsized map of the world. The Gaussian curvature police won't let you.

Re:Licensing? Severs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The question of an open source Google Earth is not the application, but where the data comes from. Google Earth probably would be open source, if Google wasn't afraid their remote protocol would be reverse engineered (at which point they would update it). Anyone who has programmed with the Google Earth COM API knows that Google goes to great lengths to protect the data they store on their servers.

FSF High priority list

[Galestar]

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html/#gereplacment

FSF is actively looking for people to contribute to any such project.

Open Street Maps

[Alanonfire]

Doesn't have street view or actual photos from what I've seen but its ok. openstreetmap.org

Re:Open Street Maps

[TheRaven64]

That was what I was going to suggest. It's difficult to tell from the original question what exactly the OP used Google Earth for, so finding a replacement isn't easy. If the problem is the lack of a places of interest overlay, then OSM is a good solution; it has a lot of overlays with various bits of metadata (for example, the location of all of the pubs in the area). It's a community effort, so if you have a GPS you can help them improve the accuracy of the maps and you can add your own points of interest. You can also access the raw data if you want to build something on top of it and they've got a nice JavaScript API.

Re:have you tried going outside?

[daeley]

daeley@debian:~$ go --outside
bash: go: command not found

Hmm.

Open Geospatial Consortium

[robkill]

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/

Re:Licensing? Severs?

[hipp5]

We use it in urban planning (architects do too). Google Earth can be linked to Sketchup. You can import terrain from Google Earth, model a structure on it, and then export it back into Earth. You can also use it for some GIS-esque analysis by defining polygons and such on it.

Re:Licensing? Severs?

[TubeSteak]

I'm trying to find out what exactly Google Earth is actually useful for??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system
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.

OSSIMplanet, pTolemy3D, Virtual Ocean and more

[Lord Satri]

NASA World Wind is the most popular afaik, but there are others, including OSSIMplanet, pTolemy3D, Virtual Ocean and quite a few other ones depending on your requirements.

Re:Licensing? Severs?

[ACalcutt]

Google Earths main benefit is its KML format. Google documents the KML format very well ( http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/topicsinkml.html ). I use google earth with my wireless network scanner ( www.vistumbler.net ). It has allowed me to do some interesting stuff with the wireless data, for example. - We have a wireless database with over 100,000 Access Points. This creates a 75MB kml files of access points. Google maps is unable to load a KML of this size directly. (see our full KML http://www.vistumbler.net/wifidb/ --> Daemon Generated kml) - I have a feature to export signal history to google earth as a 3d/colored/line above the earth (see http://forum.techidiots.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=278&start=0&hilit=Signal+Mapping ) - I have a feature called AutoKML which automatically creates 4 kml files. One of track you have driven, one with active APs, one of Dead APs, And one with the current GPS position. With a "Network Link" google earth updates the changes in the kml file at a specified interval and displays them. I can also specify a view height and current location, so I can make google earth follow my current location (and show me the active APs I am detecting). These are only a few examples of what I use google earth for. I'm sure there are much more creative uses for it.

Re:Licensing? Severs?

[GrahamCox]

I'm trying to find out what exactly Google Earth is actually useful for???

Never mind Google Earth, I'm trying to find out what an "Atlas" is useful for, or what are all those funny map-thingys covered in strange squiggles that you can buy all over the place. I mean, I don't have the imagination to see what they could possibly be useful for, so they just seem like a total waste of paper and printing to me.