hi,<br><br>a quick note to end the confusion on the open-ness and license terms of LAStools.<br><br>On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 10:28 PM, francesco <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:francesco.pirotti@unipd.it">francesco.pirotti@unipd.it</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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I've been trying out the following open source on lidar data: [...] Martin Isenberg's lastools (not clear if source
is all open). [...]</div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"><br>
</div></blockquote><br>At first LAStools was just supporting my own research on memory-efficient LIDAR processing via Delaunay TIN streaming [1] and visualizing LIDAR with Google Earth [2]. When Howard contacted me on 17 Nov 2007 about turning my existing LAS reader/writer hack into a proper software engineering project called libLAS, LAStools was just a few tools (i.e. lasinfo, las2las, las2txt, txt2las, ..). At that point these tools branched off and now also (!) life with a BSD license inside libLAS.<br>
<br>Later I added more elaborate tools to LAStools. I did that sort of as an evening hobby and without specifying any licensing terms due to my own ignorance (or incompetence) on those things.<br><br>So what are the terms? Some parts of LAStools are open source (LGPL). Some are not (at least for now as some tools may move into the open). Here are the current terms in more detail [3]:<br>
<br> These LAStools are open-source and LGPL-licensed (see COPYING.txt):<br>* laszip<br> * las2las<br> * lasinfo<br> * lasdiff<br> * lasmerge<br> * las2txt & txt2las<br> * lasprecision<br> * LASzip - the lossless LAS compressor at <a href="http://laszip.org">http://laszip.org</a><br>
* LASlib (with LASzip) - the API used by LAStools.<br><br> These LAStools require a license for commercial use. But they can<br> be used freely for non-commercial and non-military purposes that<br> are private, educational, humanitarian, not-for-profit, research,<br>
or where you can convince me that they will better the world.<br><br> * lasboundary<br> * las2tin<br> * las2iso<br> * las2dem<br> * lasthin<br> * lassort<br> * lastile<br> * lasclip<br> * lasview<br>
* las2shp & shp2las.<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>Martin<br><br>[1] <a href="http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/tin2dem/">http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/tin2dem/</a><br>[2] <a href="http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/googleearth/">http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/googleearth/</a><br>
[3] <a href="http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/download/LICENSE.txt">http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/download/LICENSE.txt</a><br>