The interface on the Google service is identical as best as I can figure - does "Do no evil" include saying thank you to the authors of open source code?
I see a lot of differences; maybe they even recoded it from scratch. But it uses some interesting tricks I invented, and doesn't use the easy features that I didn't include. They definitely have at least seen the source code.
When I read about Panoramio (Google product) on TC today, I thought about how similar it is with your product. I don't know how long Google has been working on Panoramio, but I think you have a good product. Instead of closing the project down, did you try to get funding and take your service to next level?
I never wanted to earn money with this thing, it was conceived and started as a non-profit. My number one goal was to see Sagrada Familia again, as it should be seen. The other goal was to change people's minds, change the web, open a new possibility. Win on both counts.
Hmm... very interesting. Flash is sent to the browser as a binary then, right? The GPL says that any derived works which are distributed as binaries must have the source code (including the changes) made available publicly.
Out of curiosity and to maintain the openness of open source software, it might not be a bad idea to mention to Google that the app looks to use GPL software and request to see the source. Of course, if they rewrote it, this is a bit more complicated (a line-by-line rewrite, or an interface-based rewrite?), but it might be worth a shot.
Yes, but it's also a good thing that open source software is becoming mainstream. If companies are able to present someone else's open source work as their own, without even giving any credit, it destroys a huge part of the incentive for writing open source software in the first place (recognition).
I wasn't saying that the author should try to get the content taken down. I was just saying that he deserves either:
(1) a clarification from Google saying that they liked the interface and did an interface-based rewrite without consulting the his source code
-or-
(2) a release of the modified source code (as the GPL requires)
I'm not trying to stop photo VR from becoming mainstream. Since when does open-sourcing something prevent it from becoming mainstream?
Yes, thought a lot, and coded a little. Main problem: sparse bundle adjustment is slow and non-incremental. From what I hear, the same problem is delaying the release of MS Photosynth. Maybe the answer is running SBA on small numbers of user-supplied points rather than SIFT output. Maybe I'm just clueless.
Actually it was much easier than it looks - less than 5 hours per week, for 5 months. A thousand lines of code for the interface, another couple hundred on the server side. PHP, JavaScript, Flash. Cheap shared hosting account. Logo made with Web 2.0 Logo Generator.
