Google has announced that it will open source its Google Earth Enterprise software in the coming months. The software, in case you are unaware of its, allows enterprises to deploy Google Maps and Google Earth on their on-premises data center infrastructure. The company is hoping to open source it come March.
Interestingly, Google no longer sells the software but has been pushing out updates to the enterprises that already hold licenses to it. The company first launched it a decade ago, and stopped selling it commercially around a couple of years ago. The software is pretty useful as it allows companies to deploy Google Maps and Google Earth on their on-premises data center infra.
The software will now be available for free on GitHub, under an Apache 2.0 license. What that will mean is that organizations will be free to modify and change the software according to their convenience and deploy it as they see fit.
Announcing the open sourcing, Avnish Bhatnagar, Senior Technical Solutions Engineer, Google Cloud said:
We are excited to announce that we are open-sourcing Google Earth Enterprise (GEE), the enterprise product that allows developers to build and host their own private maps and 3D globes. With this release, GEE Fusion, GEE Server, and GEE Portable Server source code (all 470,000+ lines!) will be published on GitHub under the Apache2 license in March.
Meanwhile, Google Earth Enterprise Client, Google Maps JavaScript® API V3 and Google Earth API will not be open sourced. With that said though, GEE customers will still be able t use the Google Cloud platform to run their GEE instances. Google believes that even that will bring a noticeable difference to enterprise customers.
However, we believe that the advantages of incorporating even some of the workloads on GCP will become apparent (such as processing large imagery or terrain assets on GCP that can be downloaded and brought to internal networks, or standing up user-facing Portable Globe Factories).
The code will be launched on Github in March and you can also expect Google to come up with white-papers and other technical resources before that. Meanwhile, the company has advised that users visit the Google Earth Enterprise Help Center and review the essential and advanced training for how to use Google Earth Enterprise.