Bug#400070: RFP: gaia -- Google Earth client

[Dominique Andre Gunia <webmaster@earth3d.org>]

Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Axel Beckert]
>   
>> Gaia is both a free library and free client to Google Earth for Linux,
>> *BSD, MacOS X and in future also Windows.
>>
>> It was developed by reverse-engineering the Google Earth protocol and
>> is based on many well-known open source components including OpenGL,
>> SCons, cURL, SDL, libjpeg, libpng, libgps and Doxygen.
>>     
>
> This is very cool.  I had a look at <URL:http://gaia.serezhkin.com/>,
> and it seem to make good progress.  Perhaps this project should
> cooperate with the earth3d project, <URL:http://www.earth3d.org/>?  It
> already have a lot of the 3D stuff working.
>
> Cc to both the earth3d and gaia project authors, to make sure they are
> aware of each other.  There is also the NASA WorldWind project with a
> java client available from <URL:http://www.ww2d.org/>.
>
> Friendly,
>   
Thanks for this information! But the project seems to just have died
(from their website):

25 November 2006, we've got the letter from Michael Jones, the Chief
Technologist of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local search,
requesting us to cease reverse engineering and improper usage of
licensed data that Google Earth use. 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).*

*I think this was expectable because Google will sell advertisements
using this platform in the future. A free client would not display these
ads and could therefore become more popular than their own client. And
they won't invest millions of dollars in satellite imagery to give it
away for free.

So the only source for free imagery seems to be NASA. :-(

Regards,
Dominique