By Randall Perry
Open-Source Mapping Tool Raises Licensing Concerns for Media
A new open-source application capable of rendering a photorealistic 3D model of Earth is offering powerful visualization tools to users, but a closer audit reveals significant legal pitfalls for commercial publishers and Arizona news organizations.
The software, which is MIT licensed and can be installed on a laptop in under an hour, integrates live aircraft transponders, ship beacons, orbital elements, and thousands of public cameras. However, while the code itself is free, the data fueling the visuals is not.
An analysis of the tool identified four separate noncommercial data sources embedded within the product. These include a submarine cable dataset under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and a primary flight-position feed restricted to non-commercial research and education. Additionally, the regional news panel and the 3D tiling service are both limited to personal, noncommercial use.
The discovery poses a risk to professional journalists and digital publishers. The application includes dedicated “clean-view” and recording modes designed specifically for producing publishable stills and screen captures. However, because two of the noncommercial layers—including the flight data—are active by default without requiring user consent or an account, a user may inadvertently capture restricted data.
Legal experts warn that publishing such captures alongside advertising constitutes commercial use, which is explicitly excluded by these licenses. There are no exemptions for screenshots.
Beyond licensing, technical audits revealed significant latency issues involving OpenStreetMap geometry. Initial requests took 33.6 seconds to load, a delay caused by a poorly ordered list of public mirrors. Testing showed three of the four mirrors were failing; one returned a gateway timeout after 11.3 seconds, another a server error after 35.5 seconds, and a third failed after 40 seconds.
The only functioning mirror was positioned third in the sequence, forcing the software to wait through nearly 35 seconds of failure before receiving a response in 1.2 seconds. By reordering the list, load times dropped to 12.6 seconds. Implementing a parallel request system—racing the top two endpoints and abandoning the slower one—further reduced cold request times to between two and four seconds.
The findings serve as a cautionary tale for Arizona tech users and media outlets: the “free” nature of open-source software often does not extend to the proprietary data streams that make the tools functional.
Also: northdenvertribune.com
Related: Frontier Watch
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