[OSGeo-Standards] [OSGeo-Discuss] [Ica-osgeo-labs] [TC-Discuss] Open Letter for the need for Open Standards in LiDAR

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

thank you all (and especially the board) for taking time to work on this.

Getting the issue into the media will take more effort than usual as
mentioned in a discussion on the OSGeo board [1]. The IT portal "heise
group" in Germany picked it up [2,3] after a German "open format" fan wrote
a personal email to the editor about the story. Similarly the attention of
other media [4,5] was awakened with personal effort (after the story had
already broken on blogs, in mailing lists, and the German site).

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/board/2015-April/012720.html
[2]
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/LIDAR-offenes-Dateiformat-LAS-in-Bedraengnis-2609710.html
[3]
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Lidar-Format-War-Geo-Softwarehaus-Esri-vs-Geo-Community-2615341.html
[4]
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/402914,open-source-devs-in-uproar-over-esri-lidar-lock-in-plans.aspx
[5]
http://www.spatialsource.com.au/2015/04/21/os-developers-concerned-over-new-esri-lidar-format/

But it will be hard to get wide geospatial media coverage. There seems to
be an incredible hesitation to publish anything negative about a particular
vendor no matter how "hot" the topic. The geospatial media outlets are well
aware of the story but literally "refuse" to cover it.

This seems especially evident for "LiDAR news" - the most obvious place for
this story to run - who blogged about every tiny little advance [1] [2] [3]
[4] [5] [6] [7] of "Optimized LAS" or "zLAS" (aka the "LAZ clone") but did
not run a single headline on the screaming controversy. If I were to
approach this editor I think my request will be ignored or denied.

[1] http://blog.lidarnews.com/esri-announces-the-las-optimizer
[2] http://blog.lidarnews.com/faq-on-esri-las-optimizer
[3] http://blog.lidarnews.com/early-positive-reviews-for-esri-las-optimizer
[4]
http://blog.lidarnews.com/esri-las-optimizer-updated-to-include-parallel-decompression
[5] http://blog.lidarnews.com/esri-las-optimizer-updated
[6] http://blog.lidarnews.com/esri-announces-beta-program-for-optimized-las
[7] http://blog.lidarnews.com/esris-zlas-io-library-now-available

There are some interesting thoughts by Adena Schutzberg who worked for a
number of GIS publications. She picked up the story in her private blog [1]
and added some tips on how to approach geospatial media outlets to get them
to run a story. I have beem "too outspoken" on the issue to do this myself
but getting media coverage is the next step.

Volunteers?

[1]
http://blog.abs-cg.com/2015/04/lidar-format-wars-creep-into-geospatial.html

Regards and Thanks for your help in "keeping LiDAR open".

Martin @rapidlasso

On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 8:11 PM, Martin Isenburg <martin.isenburg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Michael talks about this tool:
>
> The newest product of rapidlasso is an open source tool aiming to liberate
> LiDAR points locked-up in proprietary "Optimized LAS", a highly
> controversial, closed format with a *.zlas file extension. The new
> LASliberator comes as both, a DOS command line tool for scripting and with
> an easy-to-use graphical interface ...
>
>
> http://rapidlasso.com/2015/04/20/new-lasliberator-frees-lidar-from-closed-format/
>
> Martin
> On Apr 20, 2015 9:54 AM, "Michael Gerlek" <mpg at flaxen.com> wrote:
>
>> After some of us raised concerns about ESRI's announcement, they
>> clarified that their intended position was as Martin describes.
>>
>> They clearly didn't (don't?) understand the *intent* of the Apache
>> license and the term "open source". While perfectly legal, it was (and is)
>> very misleading of them to use the term "open source" anywhere in that repo...
>>
>> aside: They also say in that repo that "it's easy and free to convert
>> between standard LAS and zLAS". Until Martin's new tool came out today, I
>> don't believe that conversion could possibly be considered either "free" or
>> "easy" :-(
>>
>> -mpg
>>
>> On Apr 18, 2015, at 9:25 PM, Martin Isenburg <martin.isenburg at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> ESRI's github repository contain *no* source code, except a sample *.cpp
>> file to show how to use their (Windows-only) binary dll and/or lib files.
>> This is *not* open source in any sense of the word but an unusal of the
>> Apache license. Below I quote someone whom I've dicussed this with:
>>
>> It is allowed to use Apache License for binary-only software, but that is
>> extremely rare that anyone does that, because it goes against the whole
>> idea of "Open Source". It is only possible because Apache License is a
>> so-called "permissive" license, whereas GPL, CDDL and other "copyleft"
>> licenses will not allow such "source-less Open Source" non-sense:
>>
>> See this section of the FAQ on the OSI site (Open Source Initiative):
>> http://opensource.org/faq#non-distribution
>>
>> Also this Apache Foundation FAQ:
>> http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#WhatDoesItMEAN
>> "[the Apache license] *does not require* you to include the source of
>> the [..] software itself"
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Martin @rapidlasso
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Cameron Shorter <
>> cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  Hi Martin,
>>> Esri's reference below: https://github.com/Esri/esri-zlas-io-library
>>> states that the esri-zlas-io-library read/writes Optimized LAS, and is
>>> also Open Source, under the Apache license.
>>>
>>> Does this mean that it is possible to reverse engineer the Optimized LAS
>>> format?
>>> Would this open the possibility to integrate LASzip and Optimized LAS?
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> Regards Cameron.
>>>
>>
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