My Google Map Blog

As we mentioned in February, Google has decided to Open Source Google Earth Enterprise. It is available for download on GitHub.

[ Update: Thank you to GEB reader Eddy Shipman for pointing us to www.opengee.org the official Google Earth Enterprise site.]

According to the docs, it only runs on 64-bit versions of:
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6.0 to 7.2, including the most recent security patches
– CentOS 6.0 to 7.2
– Ubuntu 10.04, 12.04 and 14.04 LTS

Google Earth Enterprise consists of three core components:

Fusion – imports and ‘fuses’ imagery, vector and terrain source data, into a single, flyable 3D globe or 2D map.
Server – Apache or Tornado-based server which hosts the private globes built by Fusion.
Client – the Google Earth Enterprise Client (EC) and Google Maps Javascript API V3 used to view 3D globes and 2D maps, respectively. The client is not open source, but Google is providing it free of charge.

In general, it is an enterprise product and probably not of much interest to the casual user. But if you are in the GIS community and have imagery or even vector-based mapping data you wish to share, it may well be worth a look. There is also an opportunity for cloud services to offer preinstalled versions of it, possibly with Landsat and Sentinel-2 or other open imagery datasets.

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