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

[Johan Van de Wauw]

Hi Bas, Martin,
Martin Isenburg <martin.isenburg at gmail.com>
On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Sebastiaan Couwenberg
<sebastic at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> On 04/13/2015 06:28 AM, Martin Isenburg wrote:
>> This is the very first time (since LASzip's LGPL release in late 2010) that
>> someone brings a possible issue with a license incompatibility between LGPL
>> and FastAC to our attention. You can rest assured that this was absolutely
>> *NOT* ESRI's reason for creating the closed "LAZ clone" ...
>
> 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".
>
> For the record, I first contacted the FastAC authors about this on
> 2014-08-21. This discussion did not result in FastAC relicensing, only a
> statement of intent.
>
> I contacted the FastAC authors again on 2014-12-25 and included the
> libLAS/LASzip maintainers (Howard Butler & Martin Isenburg) in the
> recipients. Howard responded and offered his help, no word from Martin
> or the FastAC authors (not unexpected due to holiday season).
>
> If the FastAC issue is not (part) of the reasons for ESRI I wonder what
> the "legal issues" and "code problems" were that ESRI addressed with
> Optimized LAS, the FastAC issue still seems a very good explanation for
> this.
>

Is there any news on the FastAC issue? Perhaps the author should be
contacted again?

It would be nice to get LASzip support in Debian+derivatives.

Kind Regards,
Johan