[jpatokal]

"Reverse engineering" seems a bit pointless when Google has open sourced the code for Google Earth Enterprise:

https://github.com/google/earthenterprise

(Update: The client was not open sourced, just the server.)

However, this doesn't give you carte blanche to use Google's own imagery:

https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html

[retroplasma]

That project seems to use some other kind of API. It does not handle real octree/3d data AFAIK. I've only seen quadtree and terrain elevation stuff there.

[tylerl]

That's an interesting TOS.

I've never before seen "fair use" called out as an explicit allowance in terms of copyright restrictions by the part of the copyright holder. It's not entirely clear to me what that would even imply.

[userbinator]

I suspect they're trying to give more reassurance to "personal, non-commercial use is allowed as long as you don't hit our servers too hard" --- which seems to be their stance on a lot of their other services too.

[widforss]

It may have implications in countries where fair use is not a thing.

[sdwisely]

I feel like it's to explicitly allow b-roll for media.

[anc84]

Could you point to a description of the protocols and formats for the 3D data in that documentation please?

[userbinator]

I wonder why the latest release is over 800MB compressed... I doubt that includes the actual imagery either.

[oh_sigh]

It looks like they include install files for all 3rd party dependencies like postgres, python, openssl, etc.