Some questions on the estimated continuation of development and support for Cesium

CesiumJS
1

I am very impressed with Cesium but am a little hesitant to grow attached to it. Being a fully open source project I imagine the development and continuation of cesium can’t go on forever. What is the estimated time frame of the support and development of Cesium? Will it continue to function for 2,5,10,20 years? Will it continue to be open source?

2

I am not a lawyer, but generally speaking open source projects don’t become retroactively closed source. They could re-license it with a new closed source license, but that doesn’t take your existing license away. Though it is very nice to have an actual organization backing the project.

3

I’m really not sure why you would be concerned here:

  • AGI is certainly the employer of most of the primary developers, but there are a number of non-AGI employees working on it as well
  • Cesium is under an Apache 2.0 license. Even in the worst case that every single developer from AGI stopped working on it, the source would still be there for you to fork
  • Granted, with the way browsers are changing on a daily basis, it’s hard to say exactly what bits will continue to function perfectly or not at an arbitrary time in the future, but the particular technologies in use at the moment seem pretty stable and solid.
  • Cesium’s continued growth over the last couple years means there’s a large number of organizations interested in its success, particularly as browsers continue to deprecate plugins as a concept. Cesium is by far the best alternative to Google Earth.

In other words, don’t worry about it :slight_smile:

Mark Erikson

4

I appreciate your response and have decided to take your advice and not “worry about it” :). Thanks again.

5

Hi David,

Yes, no worries. :slight_smile:

Cesium development is supported by many folks. Cesium was started by AGI, who does the bulk of the development. NICTA also does significant development. There are many more contributors (see the full list), for example, in just August, Gilles Cebelieu contributed WMTS support, Balasubramaniam Natarajan contributed 14 video tutorials, and Rich Kadel created the GWT plugin.

Patrick