Datum Shift was the first to break this news..  After posting about someone from ESRI leaving, and then retracting the post after he found out it was wrong.. his site has now “vanished”.  So, is it an ESRI take down?  Someone from Manifold has finally snapped?  The “Men in Black”?  Or, just a “WTF?” moment?

Some interesting cross blogging going on in the GIS sphere today.  Mainly on using open source data serving into closed source data viewers and the “why not just go all open source then?” questions.

First off, we have Ogle Earth commenting about using the Open Source Geoserver to deliver imagery to GE.  James Fee made some comments in that post and then fired back with his own comments on that on his blog.

My thought is if you are going to go and use open source to serve the data, you may as well just go and use open source to also view the data.  There is nothing special in GE that you need to view the served data, so even an open source PHP script can view the data in a web browser.

James Fee let me know tonight that the ArcGIS Explorer is now released for the public to download and use.

You can download it from here, but you will need to register to download, of course. 

I will get a chance to see more about ArcGIS Explorer in January when I present at the Virtual Globes Symposium, ESRI will be presenting as well.