Re: Support for quadkeys

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak gnome org>]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:59 PM, Jiří Techet <techet gmail com> wrote:
> Hello Mathieu,
>
> the question is - is this quadkeys location encoding usable for
> something else than Bing and if not, is it legal to use Bing tiles
> with libchamplain? I haven't searched much but found this
>
> http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d379de41-3e41-479b-b904-c0a1441ba869/bing-map-tile-server-direct-access-through-xy-and-zoom-values-license-details-needed
>
> which doesn't look very encouraging. Frankly if it's used only by Bing

I don't think this itself should be an argument against merging such a
patch. Not saying that you implied that it is but just wanted to keep
things clear.

> and there are any licensing issues,

That is something we really should be concerned about. The post you
pointed to is about a corporate heavy-duty usage of Bing. I'd imagine
that easily going to illegal space.

We gotta read these terms before we can decide if this is going to
easily lead into illegal space or not:
http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/terms.html

If there isn't any clear legal dangers involved, I'd really love to
use Bing since that is going to give us good satellite imagery. Right
now the one we have is pretty crap when it comes to outside US.

> I would be very hesitant to add
> such a patch because people would be tempted to use it in a
> not-quite-legal way. The last thing I want are some legal disputes
> with Microsoft.

If in the end it boils down to that, I can merge the patch for you so
so Microsoft sues anyone, thats me. or my employer. :) However, I
don't think its going to get to that.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124