It'd be one thing for Google to be deceptive about it, offer a free service, and try to upsell you every point along the way. It's quite another thing for Google to dedicate an entire section in the API intro page [1] about Usage Limits.
Saying that "Google has nobody to blame but itself" is interesting when the blame is usually from developers to Google, not the other way around.
[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/
Now they are running things more in standard large-business style. There's a natural rebound from that as people adjust. I agree the pragmatic thing is to drop the high expectations; I don't think Google is going back. But I can see why people are going to get all Kubler-Ross on Google while they adjust.
If you are expecting unlimited free access to some thing like maps which employs many people and probably millions of dollars to produce, without expecting any type of return to sustain further growth...well it's time to rethink your strategy if you plan on staying in business.
Why does HN believe companies that spend millions of dollars to provide services, many times for free, and for pay with restriction are somehow "evil" (since we're talking about google this feels like an appropriate time to use this irrelevant phrase again).
That is, sadly, changing. But it's not a necessary change.
As it currently stands, one has the option of 2,500 requests per day for free or a minimum of $10,000 [1] and a limit of 100,000 requests per day.
Is it unreasonable to wish for at least one option between the two current choices of $0 and >=$10,000? The parent isn't being self-entitled, he or she clearly stated, " ... if you made it easy for single people to pay you to be able to use your data ... [emphasis added]"
[1] "What is the cost of Google Maps API for Business?" - http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-faq.html
their js map control is severely lacking in features compared to something like leaflet, openlayers, or esri's js component.
The other thing that appears to be lacking is front end geoprocessing. With esri at least, you can do quite a bit of geometry manipulation out of the box. This can be extremely useful for realtime data visualizations, as starting up a new map service is often a bottleneck with any of the backend platforms. If you can just render the new layer on the client, you save loads of time.
My last issue might just be a lack of understanding, but from what I have seen of the backend offering that google maps enterprise offers, it is missing some major features. For one, the documentation is lacking, and it appears that the entire rest api is marked as experimental. Second, although it allows for some basic hosting and whatnot (easily replicated by a free server like geoserver, which is trivial to set up), it once again does not have any real processing engine, so you have to download all of the data to another server you own anyway to do any real work on the data.
That being said, I really do think it is a great product, and I definitely point people in your direction if they are looking for a quick an easy way to add a map to a site with some basic data. At the same time, I am not sure the enterprise plan really makes much sense, since the results can be so easily replicated with geoserver + openlayers and you already need a server solution anyway for running a processing engine like grass or pyqgis.
Also note: I am probably not your typical use case, and I realize that most people just need to throw preprocessed layers on a static map. All I can say is that I look forward to the day when I do not feel like I am the only one around doing dynamic big data GIS on the web, so I don't have to keep building all of this stuff from scratch ;)
They could have possibly made all their requests within the rate limit imposed by Google. I'm unsure, however, if their usage of the data was allowed: "The Elevation API may only be used in conjunction with displaying results on a Google map; using elevation data without displaying a map for which elevation data was requested is prohibited." [1]
That said, I certainly think it's reasonable to want Google to allow paid access to their API at a rate between their current free offering and their prohibitively expensive offering for personal and small business usage.
[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/#...
Firstly, the data is freely available. It's NASA's SRTM [1], downloadable from a zillion mirror sites.
Then just take some code to calculate a lat/long offset and find the right position in the right tile. Bob Osola has some easily portable PHP for this if you need it [2].
Free hint: Putting both your tiles and your (Lua) lookup code in Redis, then calling the latter with EVALSHA, is a really neat and fast way to do this.
If you really need ocean depths, higher resolutions than SRTM offers, or stuff above 60 degrees latitude, then it gets a little more complex. But for 90% of cases doing it yourself is eminently practicable.
[1] http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ [2] http://www.osola.org.uk/elevations/
@app.route("/elevation")
def elevation():
fileName = "/path/to/raster/srtmRaster.tif"
fileInfo = QFileInfo(fileName)
baseName = fileInfo.baseName()
srtmRaster = QgsRasterLayer(fileName, baseName)
res, ident = srtmRaster.identify(QgsPoint(request.form['lat'], request.form['lon']))
return ident[0]
Yeah, I think so too. And querying SRTM tiles is prerry simple.
I've argued with the founder of delicious endlessly about the API limits they imposed which ultimately meant that nothing interesting could be done on the outside with delicious. Nothing interesting ever happened on the inside and ultimately it got sold to Yahoo! and destroyed. I guess the founder got some cash, but the data that was contributed by the end users was destroyed.
Nobody asked them for permission to sell to a psychotic company, have the site destroyed, etc.
Towards the end spammers found that they could (within the API terms) get endless amounts of legitimate 'cover traffic' to cover their links.
We had two different conversations with them and the first time the rep quoted us a rate that worked out to $72 per 1000 map impressions. The second time we spoke to a different rep who, when asked the differences between the free plan and the business plan, told us that if we were currently on the free plan outside of the ToS there would be "consequences".
Edit: I should add that afterwards we immediately switched to MapBox. Straightforward pricing, and it feels great to know that we're supporting the open source community.
I've heard of terrible sales calls with them, so maybe that's what happened, but this seems a bit of a stretch. If it did, I hope you did some basic research before deciding what to go with.
In any case, MapBox is great and they deserve the support, so at least it worked out.
I think the whole google maps enterprise was just somebody high up saying "hey, maps is popular, let's try monetizing it" and then not actually holding any of their sales people accountable for anything.
I'm not sure why you assume, among other things, that upstream contracts always make this possible.
Honest curiosity though: What kind of contract would make it impossible and would one make such a contract?
Most of them :) They often have requirements on downstream users, such as requiring we provide info about them, or that they be restricted to certain use cases, etc
There are a lot of ridiculous restrictions i've seen in my days. Most data brokers don't really want customers to go through you to get "close to bare data". Thus, they give onerous contracts, and restrict how you can sublicense the data, as well as usually requiring attribution, in the hopes that people will see your restrictions, see the attribution, and buy the data from them instead.
The process was essentially to fill out a form and send them a new, unopened hard drive. What I got back a few weeks later was about 125GB of high resolution GeoTIFFs. Along with it were PDF's explaining how the data was rectified and cleaned up as well as information for how they encoded the data.
The process and interactions really impressed me with the quality of people involved in agencies like the USGS and NASA.. just like the people who provide API's in the tech industry, they're usually really in to what they do and interested in hearing how other people are making use.
The data is totally out there and you can get your hands on it without a) breaking terms of service or b) needing any sense of entitlement or self-righteous "ethics". I think the article hit the nail on the head. In that ignoring the data freely available reduces its viability. Projects like GeoNames, OpenStreetMap, the deactivated OpenAerialMap are all incredible sources of information that we can't afford to ignore in favor of the easy way out
They are extremely competent and sincerely want you to have good data. They are also hampered by the bureaucratic limits of any large organization. So it’s like working with a large, well-run business that’s hired a lot of the best people in its field and is working on good problems, yet is large enough that it can’t move to meet the exact needs of any one customer.
But on top of that there are political concerns. They have an institutional fear that a congressperson in a budget debate is going to stand up and say something like “And apparently we’re paying the Geological Survey $N million a year to run a web server for something called geotiffs that tell you how tall hills are!” That’s my impression from reading between the lines, anyway; no government employee I know has been indiscreet enough to deliberately hint at such a fear.
For example, the best interface to SRTM isn’t from the agencies that made it, it’s a single-page project from Derek Watkins at the NYT: http://dwtkns.com/srtm/
Working with NASA in particular feels like working with an industry leader that has a mysterious policy against advertising, or even going out of its way to help you find resources. (Individuals do, but not the organization, at least not anywhere near in proportion to the number and value of its resources.)
NOAA too: they have some amazing satellite imagery that’s public domain, but they simply do not have the budget to do anything but the most halfassed job of hosting, publicizing, and documenting it, because from a funding perspective that’s frivolous. They barely archive their images, because no one with budget control gets why a weather agency should save its input data. Look up “VIIRS granule” – that’s technically open data, but yikes.
The resources are there, and if you make the effort to figure it out, the people who manage them are pretty much all a delight to work with. But you have to deal with the damage created by a political culture that too often treats our civilian space and geospatial agencies as afterthoughts rather than as highly multiplied public goods.
This would be a hard argument to defend against as it directly hits the value derived from the service rather than the idea that the service itself exists. In either case, I couldn't agree with you more that the civilian agencies really get a raw deal (and I'm sure its only compounded by the mostly stagnant level of people graduating with STEM degrees[1])
However, for the Elevation API there are two choices:
The gaming world has learned this with Steam and friends already. People will pirate the hell out of digital offerings that are not available in a reasonable manner. Steam recognized this and made games available in the most convenient manner humanly possible and are making money hand-over-fist. Sure, there are still pirates in gaming, but those are the people who are either paranoid about Steam or those who truly couldn't afford it anyhow.You're still in this pre-realization phase and have only one single entity to blame if people "misuse" your APIs: Yourself. Make the APIs available for normal people in a reasonable manner and you will find adherence to your ToS becoming the norm, not the exception.
† By sketchy i mean the facts that there is zero pricing information, it's a buzzword-slaughterhouse, and the only way to get at it is to fill out a form with a lot of information, an indication of what one might want to do and which offers no further information or even actual flesh-and-blood human contact.