After more than five years since GEE went open source as Open GEE it is with great sadness that we announce that the project will be archived on Github. Since early 2017 there has been a lot of hard work from partners, community, and Google on Open GEE, driving new features, security patches, upgrades, support, etc. We are appreciative of our partners, community, and Google for allowing us to steward this important project for this long.

The reasons for walking away from the project are several, but the primary ones being not enough resources and difficulty supporting a derivative product alongside an open-source version. Keeping backwards compatibility and linkage to both code bases just has become too difficult. While we have had some help from the community, which we greatly appreciate, it is unfortunately nowhere near what is required to keep such a large project active at a production level.

Archiving does not affect the ability to checkout, fork, or otherwise clone the code; it only prevents further changes to the code or repository state (including bugs, pull requests, etc.) The repository is scheduled for automatic archival on January 5 th, 2023.

Moving forward, we’re offering to any customer who wants to move to a supported version of GEE a glide path to GEEP (https://hexagonusfederal.com/what-we-do/products/geospatial-solutions-and-content/geep). We are making strides in providing support for RHEL 8, Python 3, containerization, and exciting new use-cases.

The Google Earth Enterprise Client (EC) desktop application will continue to be supported by Google with security patches and updates. Hexagon will continue to ensure EC compatibility with GEEP.