MrSID support in Mapserver 4.4.1

[Howard Butler]

Brendan,

MrSID is supported very well in GDAL (and therefore MapServer).  At one
time, you had to pay $500 to purchase the decompression SDK (which could be
used with GDAL), but this restriction was lifted last fall (a quick google
will find a screed by yours truly railing against this).  The situation is
*much* better now that the decompression SDK is freely available for
personal use.

The problem right now, in my opinion, is that neither ECW nor MrSID
decompression support are really redistributable because of the effort
required to enforce their licensing restrictions.  For a distribution
builder, this presents a problem.  At one time, in my "Kitchen sink"
binaries, I had ECW and MrSID support, but now that I know more about the
licensing stuff, I am refraining from doing that anymore.  It isn't worth
the hot water I could potentially get in.  It's unfortunate, because
building up a MapServer+GDAL+xyz libraries on windows is a pretty
formidable challenge for most users, especially those who just want to be
able to use publicly available data like the NAIP imagery (which only comes
in MrSID form).

Another thing to note is that the consensus is that the current ECW license
pretty much prevents its use with MapServer.  The next revision of the
license is supposed to allow its use with MapServer and others.  Even so,
it is probably unlikely that you'll see a MapServer binary distribution
that you can download and use with support for ECW (or MrSID) without
compiling everything yourself.

Howard



At 11:06 AM 4/15/2005, Brendan Walashek wrote:
>It was my understanding that Mr.SID was not supported because Lizardtech
>never wanted it to work with MapServer because of licensing issues.  ie.
>they didn't want it to serve SID images in an Open Source environment over
>the web for free without licensing it....just rings a bell from something I
>read somehwere on this list awhile back...
>Anyone else?