Re: Support for quadkeys

[Mattias Bengtsson <mattias jc bengtsson gmail com>]

On tor, 2013-09-12 at 21:59 +0200, 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.

I have no idea about any licensing issues (haven't read any ToS) but
wanted to supply some links that indicates that it seems possible to
conform to Bing's rules:

- The iD-editor on osm.org has a Bing Aerial layer that people uses to
  map new areas.

- OpenLayers has a Bing layer in their default API:
  http://dev.openlayers.org/apidocs/files/OpenLayers/Layer/Bing-js.html

- There's a Leaflet plugin listed on the official Leaflet plugins page 
  providing a Bing tile layer: 
  https://github.com/shramov/leaflet-plugins

- There's also this Leaflet plugin:
  https://gist.github.com/pagameba/1221998

> From reading the documentation on the OL Bing layer and the code for the
last Leaflet TileLayer it definitely looks like there's some demands on
attribution. Maybe there's more. 

Mattias