Celestia costs money now??

[Christophe]

Does Seeker use a large part of Celestia's code? Since in this commercial product, noone gets to see that code, how can this be found out??

If you suspect such copyright violation, the first thing would be to check the symbols used by Seeker. Of course that would work only in the simpliest cases if the code was copied without refactoring.

Some people are working on new ways to detect software theft, that's only for Java but the same method could apply to C/C++ too.

In other words, one my cynically ask whether the GPL2 is only the licence for the "loosers"? As soon as a GPL2 product becomes a "winner" => snatch its code and sell it ;-) .

Strange as it may seem, some people are okay with that. Look at the BSD licence, BSD contributors are usualy strong opponents to the GPL way of keeping the code free.

[t00fri]

Another possibility to get a better feeling would be to ask

Richard S. Wright Jr.
richard@bisque.com
Lead Developer for Seeker

how and from where Seeker gets its data. Celestia has so many data in it's data base from solarsys.ssc to deepsky.dsc including all sorts custom corrections ... So any larger coincidences of multidigit numbers would be quite indicative...

Unfortunately, it seems there is no trial/demo version available for download? Do they have galaxies included?

Bye Fridger

[ElChristou]

Do they have galaxies included?

Don't think, it is supposed to be a Solar system simulator only. Their MW background must be one like Stellarium...

Anyway, even with a few nice screenshots (the lunar eclipse seems nice) I doubt this soft is better than Celestia. Now of course, if our dev continue this way...

[hank]

Now the real point to me seems this:

Does Seeker use a large part of Celestia's code? Since in this commercial product, noone gets to see that code, how can this be found out??

Seeker is only allowed to use Celestia's code, if it satisfies the GPL2 conditions!

I have no way to know for sure, of course, but I doubt that Seeker uses any Celestia code.

My conclusions from a cursory review of the user's manual (available for download from Software Bisque):

Seeker is strictly a solar system simulator: no 3D stars, no galaxies or nebulae. The background star positions are from the SAO catalog. It includes only a handful of asteroids, although more can be added by the user. Customization is limited compared to Celestia.

From what I gather, Seeker's main selling points are its "commercial-quality" graphics and its usability, particularly its ease of installation and its GUI-based flight controls and tour scripting.

- Hank

[selden]

Comments on the Web site indicate that Seeker is also being optimized for use in planetariums. It can create fisheye mappings and supposedly the next release will be able to be used with spherical mirror projectors.

[John Van Vliet]

well there is always GPL 3 ??? for celestia

please on flaming on version 3 of the GPL

[Christophe]

well there is always GPL 3 ??? for celestia

please on flaming on version 3 of the GPL

From the Celestia README:

LICENSE
-------
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
version.

So wether we like it or not, Celestia is already released under the GPLv3. Now should that clause be removed from futur versions, that's an open question.

I personaly haven't really looked into it yet, but I'm not sure the new provisions of version 3 make much difference for Celestia.