[Qgis-developer] Adding plugins to core?

[Vincent Picavet]

Hello,

Le lundi 7 avril 2014 12:05:05, Nyall Dawson a écrit :
> On 7 April 2014 18:15, Vincent Picavet <vincent.ml at oslandia.com> wrote:
> > A good solution though would be to remove google layers and only use OSM
> > and mapbox layers, which begin to be on par in terms of quality.
> 
> I'm pretty sure this is against MapBox's terms of service too, unless
> users were made to sign up for a MapBox account and had to add their
> individual API key to QGIS to unlock MapBox layers:
> "You must have a Mapbox account to use Mapbox. You are required to
> register for an account before using the Service. Each request to the
> API must include your account's unique API identifier. Unauthorized
> use of any API identifier is prohibited." [1]

Right, I had not read this through. It would probably be much easier to get a 
specific authorization from MapBox than from Google though, given their open-
source orientation.

> > Or let the user a
> > deliberate way to add google layers (indicating a URL or something like
> > this), warning him about the licence.
> 
> Hmm... while this may be a workable solution to the licensing issue,
> wouldn't it be a step back in functionality anyway? We'd be trading
> having a good, working off-the-shelf third-party plugin for a crippled
> core version which takes user intervention to unlock the same
> features.

In any case, there are quite a lot of OSM based layers which can be used (HOT, 
OSM.fr, OpenCycleMap...). We can still enhance the plugin with those.
It would lack an aerial imagery layer though.

> I'm totally for adding essential plugins to core (or merging the
> functionality with reimplemented c++ versions), but I honestly don't
> know if it's workable to do this for the OpenLayers plugin.

Right, if we remove everything from the plugin except the TMS YXZ layers, we 
could also just have a better ergonomy for opening this kind of layers through 
GDAL, and have a predefined list of layers accessible on internet (even auto-
updatable by downloading the list).

Vincent