With what sounds like the industry moving to something more like high throughput real time mapping, does that mean that there's a chance we'll see an open source imagery dataset/tile server sometime afterwards, when the current dated offerings become less competitive?
I’d love to see someone step up and try to improve this, there’s programs in place at both NASA and ESA for making access to their own archives of satellite imagery and other data, but there’s a lot more imagery out there. It would be good to have some kind of internet archive style depository run by an organisation dedicated to preserving the data.
So that satellite imagery providers could chuck them a copy with contractual guarantees about how and when the information can become public access, that satisfy the imagery providers and make the process streamlined enough to keep up with the increasingly volume of imagery being produced.
It would be a shame to see valuable archives of imagery that catalogs the history of our planet, lost due to someone losing track of the either the data itself or the copyright ownership (and thus are legally unable to keep the data) between now and the absurdly long time in the future that such images become public domain over a hundred years from now. Most companies don’t last a hundred years so this kind if stewardship feels like an important thing to start working on now rather than later.
