NASA World Wind FAQs
What is the license under which NASA World Wind is available? NASA World Wind is available as an open source program. It is an open source program in a true sense. Therefore, if you want, you can download it and alter the source code. However to be more precise, the license for NASA World Wind is LGPL type. Thus if you make some modifications to the source you may or may not be allowed to redistribute it.
You can see the NOSA page that has a good explanation of the things that you can do and the ones that you cannot.
Does NASA have any intensions of making world wind commercial in the future?
No, NASA is a government organization, not a commercial organization. The NASA World Wind project is funded by the government and therefore there is neither any need nor permission to charge anything from users. Only the federal taxes are applicable.
Therefore, it is going to be always free and open source in nature. The data, which is provided by NASA itself, can be guaranteed to remain free. However, such guarantee cannot be given for the data or products from the third parties. These third parties have their own terms and policies. Some of them may charge some fee for their services in the future.
Are there any hidden charges for using NASA World Wind?
No, NASA World Wind is absolutely free. NASA does not charge anything from these users. You can use it for viewing data and imagery, which you can save and use for other purposes. You can also view, alter and redistribute the source code just like any other open source software.
Though some people think that according to the NOSA license of the Free Software Foundation, it is not free. This may be because the Free Software Foundation has its own definition of the word “free”. However, the definition that FSF assumes for word “free”, is not the only one and so others can assume different definitions for “free”. We should also remember that FSF does not have a trademark of the words like “Free Software” or “Free”.
No compliant, about the NOSA license, has been received from any developer until now.
Why does NASA World Wind use Can# and DirectX?
You can view the discussion about this in the forums.
Are there any Linux or Mac ports for NASA World Wind?
There are currently no Linux or Mac ports, however, NASA World Wind urges programmers to start a port on these systems. If the programmers do it, NASA World Wind will give them all possible support and resources, which will help them in doing so.
Programmers, who want to work for creating a port for these systems, can check out the community resources at porting world wind.
In addition, you should note that Java SDK is cross platform and so you can use it with these operating systems as well. If you need more information about it, you can check the Java Section of world wind.
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