serial

Let's say you have a GPS and you want to use it with multiple applications. On Linux, this is easy, because basically every program today utilizes GPSd for GPS communications. GPSd connects one or more clients to one or more GPS devices, and also has support for NTP (for providing time information.) However, it does not support Windows (and in fact they are fairly nasty about it) even though it's a fairly simple trick when using Cygwin.

After spending several hours looking, however, I did finally find a free (as in beer) solution that works for Windows XP. It involves the extremely hard-to-locate (but not any more!) gpsd from gps3d...