[Qgis-user] QGIS and ECW and MrSid formats

[Marco Pasetti]

Hi all,


>> Could we clarify the situation for ecw and Mrsid
>> formats in QGIS? (and perhaps put a note
>> somewhere in the qgis web pages).
>>
>> I think that not being
>> able to read these formats is a major drawback
>> in practice. At least in Spain, a lot of public
>> available raster layers are in these formats.
>> Also, for example, the imagery at
>> https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/
>> (I know the original landsat images for those
>> are available in not compressed formats, but
>> that site is very convenient for many people)
>>
>> If there is a compiled version of gdal including
>> support for these formats, why QGIS cannot? In any
>> case, is there any workaround so that users can get
>> to have ecw/Mrsid support out of their compiled version?
>> Perhaps through a plugin?
>>
>> I really think that the final QGIS1.0 should be able to read in
>> those formats, somehow. This is probably seen as a minor concern for 
>> developers, but a significant problem for users.
>>
>> Agus

I think the problem doesn't rely on what the dev-community want to do, but 
on what we can do. MrSID and ECW licenses seem to be incompatible with the 
GPL.
I'm not a license expert, so I cannot judge on that, but some time ago I 
deeply discussed with license experts about that, and their response was 
that "MrSID and ECW licenses are NOT GPL compliant".
I'm only a code and packaging developer, and it's not task to decide about 
such things, but if the PSC members will tell me to add those format 
supports into QGIS, I'll try to do that (I'll need to apply some tricks to 
compile them with MinGW, but I'll try).

Regards,

Marco Pasetti