[OpenLayers-Dev] Suddenly I have a streetview icon (and function) when I add a google maps

[Andreas Hocevar]

Just some clarifying comments inline - no new information.

-Andreas.

On Oct 11, 2010, at 14:56 , <christopher.schmidt at nokia.com> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 11, 2010, at 7:47 AM, ext Andreas Hocevar wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> no need to do a new release, as Google seems to have reverted to the old behavior (no streetview icon) again.
> 
> Okay, cool.
> 
>> In my opinion, with things like this happening, it is time to think about the relationship between OpenLayers and commercial map providers.
>> 
>> I see two options (the 1st is the preferred one):
>> 
>> 1. Make commercial map providers (Google) aware of the use case of using their maps in a third party framework (OpenLayers) that has everything to consume the tiles directly. It would also be a wind for them (no need to respond to bugs that come from this use case). Note that this seems to be possible already for Bing tiles.
> 
> I'm not sure what you're suggesting here exactly -- if it's direct tile
> access via OpenLayers, I think that's unlikely to ever happen for 
> contractual reasons.

As I said, it seems the Bing Terms of Use would allow us direct access to their tiles already. So this might help in convincing Google.

> If it's telling Google to stop acting like their
> API is a toy they can mess with on demand and treat it as something 
> that other people use in the way that OpenLayers does, I think this
> is important,

This is what I meant with option 2.

-Andreas.


-- 
Andreas Hocevar
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/
Expert service straight from the developers.