Non-free software is divisive and harmful. [LWN.net]

Non-free software is divisive and harmful.

Posted Jun 15, 2006 6:37 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Non-free software is divisive and harmful. by bignose
Parent article: Google Earth for Linux

Actually, the people who feel that way will simply refrain from using Google Earth.

One could argue that the mere existence of Google Earth make it likely that some fall for the temptation to call it "good enough" and refrain from contributing towards a free program.

But I find that highly unlikely, it's obvious to everyone I suspect how much more useful a free program would be, if anything I think Google Earth shows some people exactly how useful and thus make it *more* likely they'll contribute to a free version.

The dataset is many orders of magnitude more valuable, and many orders of magnitude more work to gather and maintain than the viewer by the way. The real coup would be to get one or more of the many government-owned mapping-organisations to release their data under a free license. Arguably that data has already been bougth and paid for by the tax-payers.

In the sharpest area, the resolution is such that 1 pixel represents 10x10 cm (around 4x4 inches), that is sufficient that you can make out individual people. A single square km at this resolution is 100 megapixel and probably take up around 5-10 MB.

There are 150 million square kilometres, so in total this would be a dataset of around 750 - 1500 TB.

The dataset behind Google Earth is however nowhere near complete, this resolution is only available for most densely populated areas, and not even everywhere there. A guess is Google migth have 100 TB of data for Google Earth.

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Non-free software is divisive and harmful.

Posted Jun 16, 2006 11:42 UTC (Fri) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link] (1 responses)

"The dataset is many orders of magnitude more valuable, and many orders of magnitude more work to gather and maintain than the viewer by the way. The real coup would be to get one or more of the many government-owned mapping-organisations to release their data under a free license. Arguably that data has already been bougth and paid for by the tax-payers."

Wholly agree.

This is a real buggaboo imho. There are dozens if not hundreds of
(wholly)taxpayer funded GIS projects either started or matured every
year, who owns the data? And yes, you can be certain that someone
owns it.

Right now, I'm aware of a not-for-profit that might be shutting down.
they have gigabytes of GIS databases, that various state and federal
agencies as well other not-for-profit agencies have paid for. Who gets
the data?

I'm not articulate enough to express this concern. Whenever I try to
speak to folks about it, they start looking at me like I'm from mars
or something.

"whaddya mean 'who owns it?'"

What ever happened to public domain?

Non-free software is divisive and harmful.

Posted Jun 21, 2006 23:39 UTC (Wed) by omez (guest, #6904) [Link]

"I'm aware of a not-for-profit that might be shutting down.
they have gigabytes of GIS databases, that various state and federal
agencies as well other not-for-profit agencies have paid for. Who gets
the data?"

Answer: Nobody. Just because it's in some another organizations's database, doesn't mean it's up for grabs when they bite the dust. Those state and federal agencies tend to retain copyright to thier GIS products.