Confused about the license

CesiumJS
1

Guys I am not getting it.
When I am using CesiumJS on my site where i am tracking vehicles with it - do I am using CesiumJS or Cesium ION on which i am supposed to pay license ?!

2

The following is not legal advice. For the actual, specific, legal details, others will have to chime in here.

But a rough summary on a technical level:

  • CesiumJS itself is an Open Source library (Apache 2.0-licensed) for rendering, focussed on geospatial data. You can use it, for free, without paying for anything.
  • The data that is displayed in CesiumJS has to come from some source. And the “default globe” that is shown in CesiumJS uses data from Cesium ion. This data is not free. You need a license for this.

(There are additional services that are used in CesiumJS that are not free, but your main question was about the data and ion).

So when you are talking about an application for tracking vehicles, then you could use CesiumJS to load your vehicle models (maybe as glTF files), and display the vehicles, and maybe some paths (using polylines) and metadata (using labels) and whatnot…

But when you want to show these vehicles on “the globe” (i.e. on top of textured terrain data), and you want to use the data from Cesium ion, then you need a license to use this data.
(If you know a source of textured terrain data that does not require a license, then you could use this source instead of Cesium ion. But I’m not aware of a source for high-quality textured terrain data that is giving away this data for free…)

3

So… is the default globe without the tiles a licensing target or only the map tiles on it are ?

4

The default globe that appears when you open the empty sandcastle already uses tiles from VirtualEarth. Also, there are some services (like GeoCoder for searching locations) that rely on paid services under the hood. But maybe you don’t need these functionalities. Hints about how to ensure that you are not using Cesium ion are given (indirectly) in the Offline Guide. Specifically, the “Offline Mode” Sandcastle shows how you can use plain CesiumJS (without using Cesium ion) in a way that does not require any licensing.