[OSM-talk] [josm-dev] Bing imagery now available in JOSM

David Murn davey at incanberra.com.au
Wed Dec 1 23:58:35 GMT 2010


On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 01:29 +0300, Upliner wrote:
> Imagery plugin which combines wmsplugin and slippymap plugin is now
> available. It's in experimental stage and there is some questions
> about future of these plugins, however tracing the Bing imagery with
> offset correction seems to work well. 

You are aware that accessing Bing images other than directly through
their API is against the licence?  ie. you cannot make an external WMS
layer or rewriter, to give others access non-directly to the API.

On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 13:07 +0100, Sebastian Klein wrote: 
>  
> > and it is legal to use it?
> 
> Yes, see http://opengeodata.org/microsoft-imagery-details.
> 
> Richard Fairhurst, seems to be in closer contact with the people from MS 
> and there may be minor revisions, but these are basically the terms we have.

This is a scary thought.  Does this mean the Bing licence has the same
catch as the odbl licence, where 'we may change to any other licence in
the future'?  Is there any hope of the licence being decided upon and
not being changed in the future?  Should we wait until that stage, to
ensure they dont screw us over, and once a big portion of map data is
bing-derived, claim they own all derived works for themselves, which as
its all tagged as coming from bing, they'd be legally entitled to do
so.

It does sort of surprise me that licences can be drawn up for Bing in a
matter of days (over a holiday weekend), but the odbl and CTs still
cant reach agreement after (apparently) how many years since they were
introduced.  It shows that if you really want things to happen, they
can.

David





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