[OSGeo-Standards] Please review: Open Letter asking to avoid format fragmentation in LiDAR standards

[Martin Isenburg]

Hi,

This is not the first time, the first time I contacted you about it was
> on 2014-12-25. Look for Message-ID <549C7BBB.8010900 at xs4all.nl> in your
> @rapidlasso.com mailbox or a thread with the subject "LASzip FastAC code
> license issue".
>

Oups. Found the thread. You are right. There was a discussion on this
between you, Howard, and me over the Christmas days of 2014. I did not
follow up as I was busy preparing myself to relocate to the Philippines for
an over three months trip two days later. Once on the road criss-crossing
Asia I never remembered it ... sorry about that oversight.

But in any case: FastAC has *absolutely* nothing to do with said "legal
issues". I had an on-going conversation about all kinds of technical and
legal details with ESRI and the name FastAC was never mentioned.

At the time there was no LASzip DLL. So to use LASzip you had to either
take the code from here [1] and use it together with libLAS [2] or you had
to write your own wrappers to take care of the (uncompressed) writing of
the LAS header and the LASzip VLR. The only other option was to use it via
LASlib [3] but that was at the time limited by language that did not allow
the US nuke-labs to use the code. And it was distributed in one zip
file [4] together with the commercial tools of rapidlasso. Working the way
through understanding which parts of the how to use LASzip legal was what
the legal department was doing. This was not about FastAC.

Here the original message from the 5th of February 2013 that resulted in my
mention of "legal issues" in the history of LAS and "Optimized LAS"
write-up:

"I had started on this. Currently the legal aspects are being reviewed.
They were having some issues separating the LPGL aspects from LASZip from
the remainder of LASTools etc.

I will ping the appropriate people in Esri again to get a more definitive
answer if anything is required from you."

Because of these troubles I released the LASzip DLL a few months later. I
would have liked to get paid for this work but I was more worried about
putting unnecessary road-blocks into the adaptation of LASzip of ESRI and
others ...

[1] http://github.com/LASzip
[2] http://liblas.org
[3] http://laslib.org
[4] http://lastools.org/download/LAStools.zip

I hope that it is very clear now that "FastAC" has nothing to do with said
"legal issues" ...

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso
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