[josm-dev] Bing imagery

[Richard Fairhurst]

Hello all,

== JOSM users: please read ==

Your developers are great people and I'm sure they will be making the 
imagery live when they humanly get a moment, no doubt within the next 
day or so. Please have faith in them and stop bugging them. And me.

== JOSM developers: please read ==

Bing imagery is now live in Potlatch 2. Just because I've been asked 
about this five times already in the last 10 minutes by eager JOSM 
developers, here's some basics for you. Bear in mind that I don't have 
any official role with anyone except as P2 pointman, which simply means 
people have told me stuff.

You are allowed to display Bing tiles for tracing _BUT_

a) You must display a Bing logo, hyperlinked to Bing maps
b) You must display the credits for the imagery providers relevant to 
the current viewport
c) You must display a link to the terms of use

The difficult bit is b), and you may find out the imagery providers by 
one of two ways:

i) Look at the headers served with the tile; match them up against a 
list of copyright strings provided by Bing. (I can't give you that list. 
Maybe Bing can.)

ii) Use the Bing API provided for that purpose. I call 
http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Imagery/Metadata/Aerial/0,0?zl=1&mapVersion=v1&key=[potlatch's_bing_maps_key]&include=ImageryProviders&output=xml 
and that gives me everything. You can get a Bing maps key from 
www.bingmapsportal.com. I'd suggest you get one for JOSM.

Feel free to use Potlatch 2 as a reference implementation for this. Most 
of the code is in 
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/changeset/24461/applications/editors/potlatch2 
(and a few little layout tweaks subsequently).

The Bing ToUs are a little awkwardly written in places. I'm going to be 
talking to their lawyer guy but two things you might query:

- "online editor" does not exclude JOSM. I've had this confirmed by a 
guy at Microsoft, they're using it in the sense of "edits an online 
resource" rather than "an app hosted only on a website"
- "non-commercial editor" means, AIUI (haven't confirmed this), they 
don't want it in saleable products like the ArcGIS extension. This might 
mean that your Bing config string has to sit in a non-GPLed file. 
Alternatively you could read "non-commercial editor" as "source code 
must always be available for a charge no more than your cost of 
physically performing source distribution", i.e. it's ok as long as 
you're not _only_ selling it (this would accord with a definition 
elsewhere in the ToU). I honestly don't know. I'll see if I can get this 
clarified.

I believe Ian Dees is working on all of this so you shouldn't actually 
have to bother with anything yourself. But JOSM people keep asking me 
about it, so, well, here you go.

cheers
Richard