[Xastir] CalTopo tiles

[Tom Hayward]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Tom Hayward <esarfl at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Fred Hillhouse <fmhillhouse at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> There are other "slippy tile" maps available. I use a series from ArcGIS
>> that is basically the same as the USGS topographic maps. CalTopo also has
>> a
>> few useful tiles as well.
>
>
> I have created .geo files for using CalTopo tiles in Xastir. They work fine,
> but the OSM license is still in the corner (I think Xastir's code puts this
> over all tiles).
>
> Speaking of licenses, please make sure you are using the CalTopo tiles
> appropriately. Matt puts a lot of time and money into creating and serving
> those. He charges a license fee for use outside of caltopo.com.

I have asked Matt for clarification of the usage agreement for CalTopo
tiles. Here's what he said:

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Matt Jacobs <matt at mattj.net> wrote:
>
> For users adding things as a one-off, I don't need anything special.  For
> them to be included as the default, I need:
>
> * Some form of attribution.
>
> *  A sensible user-agent (for apps) or referring URL (for websites) when
> fetching tiles.  I turn on logging a couple days a month - too expensive to
> do it constantly - and have scripts that compute bandwidth by user-agent,
> referrer, etc.
>
> * For web sites, a point of contact so that I can occasionally send out
> URL updates.  I tell browsers to cache the tiles for a long time, so if I
> make intrusive changes I'll update a dummy parameter (currently v=1) to
> invalidate existing caches.  Having everyone in sync on this helps my
> bandwidth and gives a better user experience.
>
> * For apps, it should be hard for users to prefetch bazillions of tiles
> unless the developer wants to pay me.

I'm going to work on adding CalTopo tiles to Xastir. They work as-is
with the OSM code, but they are attributed to OSM :-) I'm planning to
rewrite some of the OSM code so that we can specify an attribution in
the .geo file, and also ensure that Xastir is sending an appropriate
user-agent and that Matt has that user-agent on file.

Tom KD7LXL