Re: Support for quadkeys

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

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Jiří Techet <techet gmail com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:31 PM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
> <zeeshanak gnome org> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Well, my point was that if it really isn't legal to use Bing for some
> reason and if quadkeys is only usable for Bing, then this patch is
> only useful if you use it in a non-compliant way, which is something I
> don't want to support.
>
> > > 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
>
> Good luck ;-). I'm afriad that even if I read that I won't understand
> all the legal implications it has...

You are correct, reading through those I'm not getting any clear picture.

Having said that, maybe we should seek help from our director who is a
lawyer by profession, Karen Sandler? If you don't mind, I'll forward
the info to her.

> > > 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.
>
> I'm not really afraid of that ;-). If there's nothing like "don't use
> the Bing service in 3rd party libraries" and it looks it's possible to
> use Bing legally, I have no problem with merging the patch and adding
> support for Bing in libchamplain.
>
> It would be useful to find if someone else uses the Bing maps too.
> I've noticed Garmin uses it in it's Garmin Connect web interface but
> so far I haven't seen it in any non-web application, which is why I'm
> a bit skeptical if it's legal.

Yeah, that would have made the decision easy.

> Google for instance doesn't allow this.

IIRC Google's TOU is usually pretty clear about their services/API.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124