[OSGeo-Discuss] LAS library

[Frank Warmerdam]

Zachary L. Stauber wrote:
> Hi All,
>      I've got a question for the OSGeo board, whoever might like to answer 
> this.  I've organized the New Mexico, USA chapter of OSGeo, and we have our 
> own server which we have yet to put up any code or projects on yet 
> (www.nmosgeo.org), because that was meant for things that we would develop in 
> the future (after the chapter had been created), feeling like we wouldn't get 
> anything we'd already done under the umbrella of an employer released 
> outright.
>      However my employer has just finally given their blessing to release the 
> internal LAS file reader/writer library that we've been using to open source, 
> most likely as LGPL.  The library was written by John Nipper, who also wrote 
> the LAS v1.0/1.1 standard and it's written in Visual C++ 6.0, but it is 
> rather vanilla (e.g., structs rather than objects whenever possible) and I'm 
> sure it'll have python and C# hooks in there pretty quick once it's OS.
>      My question is: rather than putting it straight on an SVN source server 
> on our local site, I wanted to know if the OSGeo folks thought it would get 
> more mileage if they hosted it on osgeo.org on their own source tree?  If not 
> we'll do it.  But if OSGeo does, it they would control who has access to the 
> SVN or CVS.  John isn't really interested in parenting it anymore.  Otherwise 
> we'll host it on www.nmosgeo.org and I'll be parenting the SVN with the help 
> of our webmaster, Karl Benedict.

Zack,

One possibility is hosting it with the sandbox area of the GDAL subversion
repository if there is interest in integrating it with GDAL/OGR.  I know that
Howard Butler (on vacation this week) was looking at a LAS library and how
to integrate it with OGR.

Perhaps we could discuss this with Howard next week?

Generally speaking it seems like a pity to be setting up duplicate
services for stuff like subversion if we can just do it once. On the
other hand, there is a bit of overhead in launch newing projects within
OSGeo.

One thing we have done is provide services (like subversion and trac)
for projects like MOSS4G that aren't formally OSGeo projects but that
are compatible with our goals.  This isn't meant as an endorsement of
the projects in the way that a project that goes through incubation
is endorsed - but it does help out with services.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org