NASA WorldWind Shutting Down
NASA WorldWind Project Suspension FAQ
“WorldWind is an open source virtual globe API. WorldWind allows developers to quickly and easily create interactive visualizations of 3D globe, map and geographical information. Organizations around the world use WorldWind to monitor weather patterns, visualize cities and terrain, track vehicle movement, analyze geospatial data and educate humanity about the Earth. Learn more at worldwind.arc.nasa.gov. … As of April 5, 2019, the WorldWind project at NASA has been suspended. This means that the management and development team at NASA Ames Research Center is no longer actively supporting WorldWind. … As of April 5, 2019, the WorldWind geospatial data servers at NASA Ames Research Center have been shut down. WorldWind applications that rely on those servers may not function properly.”
I wish they had advertised it more when it was operating, i never got to try it.
It’s a nice package. I used it instead of Google Earth when I wanted to overlay information from NASA retrievals and then make images that I could use without worrying about copyright issues.
That’s not as bad as it sounds, but it could be much better. The software is out there (on GitHub) and people can still get it and use it. Further development is suspended (and I assume that includes maintenance and bug fixes…) and it relies on data servers at Ames which are going down. But it looks like there are other servers out there, and the FAQ gives information on switching to them.
But the software looks useful enough that some people would be willing to pay for it. From what I’ve seen, NASA is much better at developing software than supporting it. There are ways to transfer that to a private company. For example, there is a very useful (and formally free) program for designing charged particle instruments (SIMION) which was developed at Idaho National Labs. It’s now supported and developed by a private company.
The switch involved initially involved an agreement for the company to charge for distributing it and people were technically only paying for them to burn the CD-ROM, print the manual and mail it. The code itself was still free (a legal necessity), but the company also got permission to improve the program, and put out new versions. And to charge for the new versions, since the company was the one paying for those improvements. They still don’t charge that much (it’s a niche market, and the users don’t have very deep pockets) and I think there is still the old, public domain version floating around. But it’s been improved to the point where no one would actually want to go back to that old version. I think that’s a reasonably successful example of technology transfer, and I can’t see why NASA couldn’t do something similar in the case of this WorldWind package.