Re: Support for quadkeys

[Jiří Techet <techet gmail com>]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Mat <mat parad0x org> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I think this is the case as well. Now let's assume that using
Bing tiles this way isn't legal for some reason. Then what you are
saying is "please modify libchamplain so I can use it in an illegal
way". There's no other use case for the quadkey encoding right now.
The fact that you want this to be part of libchamplain means that you
want to share your application which uses it and I'm not at all
enthusiastic about some code which uses libchamplain and violates some
licenses. So even though I don't think applying this patch would have
any legal implications for libchamplain itself, I want to discourage
its use for not-quite-legal purposes as much as possible.

Of course if we find Bing tiles can be used without any legal issues,
I'll add its support immediately.

Jiri