[Liblas-devel] libLAS/libPC -- looking for funding, sponsorship

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Do you use libLAS in your products, or would you if it had some additional
features you need?  If so, please read on.


libLAS has been a success, but the world of point cloud support for
geospatial applications goes well beyond just reading and writing the LAS
format -- we want support for other formats, spatial index integration, a
suite of core command line tools, database integration, and so on.  To that
end, as some of you may have already heard, the lasLAS team has begun work
on "version 2" of libLAS, known as libPC.  The project goals are:

1. libPC is a library which provides APIs for reading, writing, and 
   processing point cloud data of various formats.  Additionally, some 
   command line tools are provided.  As GDAL is to 2D pixels, libPC is to 
   multidimensional points.
    
2. From a market perspective, libPC is "version 2" of libLAS.  The actual 
   code base will be different, however, and the APIs will not be
   compatible.

3. The libPC implementation has high performance, yet the API remains 
   flexible.  We recognize that these two goals will conflict at times and 
   will weigh the tradeoffs pragmatically.
  
4. The architecture of a libPC-based workflow will be a pipeline of 
   connected stages, each stage being either a data source (such as a file
   reader), a filter (such as a point thinner), or data sink (such as a
   file writer).

5. The libPC library will be in C++, but will also include a C API and will
   have SWIG bindings for languages like Python and C#. libPC will support 
   multiple platforms, specifically Windows, Linux, and Mac.

6. libPC is open source and is released under a BSD license.


In part with funding from a generous US govt sponsor (not sure if I should
name them, sorry), libPC development is already well underway.

However, more development needs to happen before it can reach parity with
libLAS and start to go into production mode.  To do this, of course, your
material support is needed.

If you use libLAS today in your world -- or if you would like to, if only it
had some missing feature -- please consider helping to fund the libLAS team.
This can be done in a variety of ways:

  - "buy" open development time to further the core libPC work
  - "sponsor" the team to implement a particular feature you need
  - loan a member of your own development staff to the team for a specific
task

Please contact me (mpg at flaxen.com) if you're interested in supporting open
source software.

-mpg