[Liblas-devel] Drivers

[Howard Butler]

On Feb 19, 2010, at 6:08 AM, Mike Grant wrote:

> On 19/02/10 02:47, Howard Butler wrote:
>> If there were such a library -- a GDAL for point cloud data -- and it
>> were called something other that libLAS, would they come?
> 
> Certainly we'd be interested in porting our codebase to it - being
> easily able to read multiple point cloud formats with a single generic
> interface is compelling.
> 
> On a related note, I recently came across
> http://code.google.com/p/lidarformat/  I've only browsed the codebase
> briefly and my French is only so-so, but it looks less generic than a
> point-cloud GDAL would be.
> 
> Mateusz has a good point about keeping liblas clean, and it would allow
> greater design flexibility if you don't need to consider the existing
> interfaces.  I imagine there'd be sufficiently close linkage between the
> projects that you'd be able to interest most of the existing liblas
> community too.

lidarformat (they even use libLAS :) ) is pretty much exactly the direction I'd like to go except 1) LGPL instead of BSD and 2) source code layout.

LGPL wouldn't be the end of the world, but I think something like this needs to be BSD to ensure wider proprietary software uptake.  Individual drivers could be LGPL though.

Howard