The times thay are a changin’ – Pt 2

At the beginning of the week Gavin Brock blogged about how his OpenSpace application that used kml to combine OpenSpace mapping with Google Earth had been shut down by Ordnance Survey.

Within a couple of hours, Peter ter Haar of OS had posted on Gavin’s blog explaining the OS position regarding Google’s claims of perpetual licenses to any data displayed over their service but also reinstating Gavin’s API key

I know there are many other tools in the market that could benefit from your application; many other tools can read a KML stream these days. Many of these tools do not claim a comparable right to the displayed content. I would like to make sure you can explore the possibilities these other tools give you and have therefore asked my team to re-instate your API key as soon as possible for a period of 3 months at least …

In the mean time, I hope Google will give the GI community the clarification it deserves on the terms and conditions of Google Earth and the Google Maps API.

A way to go but a good early indicator for those who are looking out for change at the OS.