TerraGear project mission statement

Version 1.0  1/27/2000  Curtis Olson  curt@flightgear.org

The purpose of this project is to develop open-source tools and
rendering libraries and collect free data for building 3d
representations (or maps) of the earth for use in real time rendering
projects.

1. Open-Source: The stand alone tools developed for this project shall
be GPL'd.  The supporting render libraries (which would be included in
the end-application) will be LGPL'd.

2. Free gis data: There is much freely available gis data on the
internet.  Because the data we produce has to be unrestricted, we will
only use source data that doesn't impose restrictions on derivitive
works.

However, it is fine to use those tools to process source data with
other restrictions and use/restrict the resulting data however you
choose (as long as you comply with the licensing terms of the original
data.)  In other words, the act of processing data with our tools does
not impose any additional licensing terms on the resulting data.

3. 3d Maps: We are envisioning terrain, land use data, rivers, land
mass, roads, rivers, buildings, bridges, airports, etc.  Our tools
will be useful for preprocessing raw data, splitting it up into
manageable chunks, resolving ambiguities or conflicts, and combining
everything into a form suitable for real-time rendering applications.

4. Real-time rendering: We will also include basic libraries which
application writers can use to easily load and render the resulting
data in their projects.  Because we are interested in real-time
rendering applications (such as flight simulators) our level of
detail, data sources, and results will be targetted accordingly.  If
you are primarily interested in photo-realistic ray tracing of terrain
we may be able to share some ideas and code, but this is explicitely
outside the scope of this project.