On 09/12/13 21:59, Jiří Techet 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 and there are any licensing issues, 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.
Thank you guys for responding so quickly. Honestly I don't know much about the legal aspect of using Bing or Google maps. My assumption was always that if I were to use libchamplain to access tiles from, say, Google maps (since their tile servers use X/Y/Z coordinates) then *I* would be the one infringing on their term of use, not libchamplain. I understand that the difference with Bing is that they are the only ones at the moment to use the quadkeys encoding. But then again anybody is free to implement his own tile server with quadkey encoding. I personally find this encoding pretty elegant (and I don't often compliment MS). As an alternative, how about expanding the ChamplainNetworkTileSource class to allow the user to pass a function returning a URI, as an alternative to passing a format string? The user function would basically replace get_tile_uri and do the URI encoding in different legal space. -- Mat <mat parad0x org>
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