OMB

Gaia is a project that started off as an attempt to reverse engineer Google Earth, that has now become focused on producing an open source 3D map viewer. The course of the project has been significantly steered by Google, who objected on various grounds to the project’s use of satellite and aerial photography outside of the bounds of Google’s own clients, which restrict access, impose copyright notices and so on. So now Gaia no longer shows Google’s data, but is restricted to free libre data sources. The project’s founder posts Google Earth’s Chief Technologist, Michael Jones’ letter of complaint on his site. My personal favourite was this line:

The kindness through which Google has made the wonder of our planet
available to more than 100 million users around the world is now threatened
– not by a menacing and fierce business competitor — but by you.

Oh, the overwhelming generosity of Google! All those developers working for free and the poor shareholders - how will they feed their childern? Jones has a valid point to make, but to try and play the “Google’s out to save the world” card belittles the intelligence and awareness of a community who are just waiting for the McDonalds arches to appear on every Google Map hack out there. Jones concludes:

We are like an iPod for Earth images.
If people could get the music out to play on other platforms then the music
companies would not allow Apple access to the music in the first place. This
is the situation.

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