Re: Support for quadkeys

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

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 2:48 PM, Jiří Techet <techet gmail com> wrote:
> 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".

If there is no Bing support added directly to libchamplain, its all
about the app then. An app using Bing could and could not be using
Bing legally. IMO not allowing adding of some support for a generic
concept/algorithem in libchamplain in the fear that it *could* be
easily used to connect to a service in a way that the usage is
illegal, is really getting into the paranoia side of being concerned.

I had actually misunderstood that adding quadkeys support in
libchamplain means libchamplain directly using Bing itself. Since that
is not the case, I really don't see any legal issues here to us what
so ever.

> 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.

You can't possibly know that. Mat's usage might or might not be legal
(he can reply to that but I think its pretty irrelevant) but this
could later be used by other apps in perfectly legal way.

> 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.

Of course they *can* be, thats why they provide a public API and thats
why there are third-party services using Bing, including very open
source services like Mattias pointed out in his mail.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124