GE VE discussion
Mr. Francica,

I just read your article on GE and VE being a public trust. I would have been inclined to agree, however VE is not free to government agencies. I am a federal government contractor. I created a VE mashup using Microsoft's code they freely distributed on the Web. I read the terms of use. Now, the terms of use have changed. If you are a government agency, you fall into the same category as commercial use, even though we are not charging anyone to use our site. I obviously disagree with this language, but just wanted to point out that VE is not free to government agencies. We had to carve out a piece of our contract to cover the $30,000+ this is costing us. Although Microsoft is spending "tens of millions" developing data, they are working hard to recover it. We originally chose VE because it was free and people (i.e. the public) were familiar with it. VE also had better aerial photography for our area of interest. I still am proud of the technology we developed, but I'll have to admit that ArcIMS is looking really good to me right now.

Jerri Daniels, GISP, CFM
GIS Project Manager
G.E.C., Inc.