You do post some interesting stuff and keep it up.

For anyone curious, the URL format is http://nowak.xpam.de/worldwind/irclog/2006-08-02.html  where the URL is the date. That particular date had some interesting/relevant comments towards the end, from what I saw. I loved the bit about not digging Brownian Emotion

On your points, what_nick, yes, I haven’t had spare focus to do OS development, though I’d love to and may be able to change that this year. However, my personal preference would be to keep the in-fighting to a minimum, as it doesn’t really buy the team anything IMO. I won’t tell you how to run your own project, though.

It would be very interesting to see if Skyline goes after Microsoft now or in the future. Flight simulators that page data from disk would probably not be covered, as the streaming seems to require a network link. However, a MS virtual globe (or any MS game that streams terrain from a server) could be covered. I’d love to hear if Microsoft has been contacted by Skyline too. My guess is they have not, though MS may, in fact, have more cash on hand than Google…

I won’t even begin to speculate on the possible reasons why Skyline would give MS a pass.

As far as WW goes, I realize that some of the devs do get it that Skyline could go after WW (AdamHill on the IRC seemed the most clear about it). Others were saying that prior art would protect you, which could be a fairly naive assumption given the state of things lately. And in the two days of logs I skimmed (all I had time for), one person who seemed to be a NASA person (I gathered) said Skyline wouldn’t bother with WW.

Why would SCO bother fighting Linux? What benefit did they see in suing an open source community (even indirectly)? If someone loses market share, even to a free and open product, then that’s a threat (even if you think the real threat was to MS). And Skyline sought an injunction against Google, which would have stopped GE cold. If SCO saw a way to make money or shake down companies for profit, that could be a motivation too.

I’m not saying Skyline WILL sue NASA or that Skyline is necessarily SCO, but just that it’s a threat that hangs over you unless they officially grant license to their claimed technology. And seeking license to a dubious patent is not something I’ve seen many OS devs choose to do, or even support, as it tends to re-inforce the validity of the crappy patent and the crappy patent system. I’d hope to see the opposite, which is public support for Google specifically against this crappy patent, even if you want to criticize Google on other fronts. That’s what I was addressing in my post. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.

On the data scraping, if MS owns its data and can give it away, good for them. Google doesn’t and as far as I know, can’t, Ben Discoe’s comments notwithstanding. I don’t see how anyone can judge it without hiring their own lawyer to read the contract and advise Google if they’re interpreting it incorrectly. I’m not a fan of DRM (which is essentially what we’re talking about), but the imagery providers set the rules for their data. I’ll make another post on this subject down the line, but for now, I’m repeating myself.

Oh, on the last point, whether the Katrina Disaster effort would have been helped without GE, I’ve acknowleged WW’s fine work. But I’m being very specific here. Maybe it’s worded poorly. I’m talking about the hypothetical: If Keyhole had caved to Skyline (pre Google). If that had happened, I think it’s entirely possible WW would not exist in its present highly developed form, as I believe (correctly or not) that some of the impetus for improving WW came from making an OS alternative to the huge success of closed-source GE. If Skyline had been the only player in 2003, I don’t believe there would be as much demand among consumers for a virtual earth app, period. That’s just my opinion. But it doesn’t deny that WW folks DID do a lot of work on Katrina. Sorry for the confusion.

Just a few points:
1:IRC Logs are public since it records all the decisions we take as a group.
2:The Skyline lawsuit does not precisely say what streaming terrain does. They are more likely to sue microsoft next rather than Worldwind. We are an Open Community and we have no money. Microsoft on the other hand makes flight sim.
3:The streaming idea in Worldwind are well publicized and server scripts for doing this are public.ERMapper or ESRI also stream terrain/imagery and so can you using a WCS(web content server) which is part of the Open Geospatial standard.
4:Google and Digital Globe seem to have their contract terms mixed up.Anyway even if Google shares data or not people are still pulling it out.Microsoft has allowed this for Worldwind since there is no reasonable way to prevent it once the data is on a public web site unless you use HTTPS_AUTH and lock the site up.
5: Turn up on IRC on freenode sometime and get a feel of how we work and infight.

Thanks for keeping us in the Patent loop.

what_nick.

Okay, so another Chinese submarine tunnel has been identified, this time by East-Asia-Intel.com, but is it really so hard for them to give us a placemark so we can go look for ourselves? It took all of 10 seconds scouring……