[Liblas-devel] Open source lidar software?

[Martin Isenburg]

hi,

a quick note to end the confusion on the open-ness and license terms of
LAStools.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 10:28 PM, francesco <francesco.pirotti at unipd.it>wrote:

>
> I've been trying out the following open source on lidar data: [...] Martin
> Isenberg's lastools (not clear if source is all open). [...]
>

>
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.

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.

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]:

These LAStools are open-source and LGPL-licensed (see COPYING.txt):
* laszip
* las2las
* lasinfo
* lasdiff
* lasmerge
* las2txt & txt2las
* lasprecision
* LASzip - the lossless LAS compressor at http://laszip.org
* LASlib (with LASzip) - the API used by LAStools.

These LAStools require a license for commercial use. But they can
be used freely for non-commercial and non-military purposes that
are private, educational, humanitarian, not-for-profit, research,
or where you can convince me that they will better the world.

* lasboundary
* las2tin
* las2iso
* las2dem
* lasthin
* lassort
* lastile
* lasclip
* lasview
* las2shp & shp2las.

Cheers,

Martin

[1] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/tin2dem/
[2] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/googleearth/
[3] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/download/LICENSE.txt
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