[OpenLayers-Users] Alternatives to labs.metacarta WMS?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 12:55:30AM +0800, Jani Patokallio wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> The labs.metacarta.com WMS server has been spending a lot more time down
> than up recently, and while I know it's rather ungrateful to whinge
> about a free service that is "not yet commercially supported , so [it]
> may disappear without warning or perform erratically", this is causing
> not just my OpenLayers app, but the demo map on openlayers.org to fail
> as well -- pretty bad PR for our favorite mapping software.  So...

I'm not sure how the MetaCarta Labs WMS being down is bad PR for Google
Maps... seems like it would be the opposite... ;)

I've just made changes to the server which should resolve the current
problems with performance/behavior. (The reason that the server has been
behaving terribly lately is a long and involved story that I can assure
you you don't want to know.) I expect this will resolve the majority of
complaints -- if you're still seeing it regularly going down in the
future, please feel free to email me personally and I'll spend more time
looking into it.

Additionally, moving the current server into something slightly better
maintained is on a MetaCarta todo list, but I can't say for sure where
that is.

MetaCarta does not, at this time, have any plans of offering commercial
WMS services. The data that we're using is free however -- it's simply
vmap0 -- so anyone else is welcome to take on the task of serving the
data.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta