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

Sebastiaan Couwenberg sebastic at xs4all.nl
Fri Sep 11 02:52:11 PDT 2015


On 11-09-15 11:29, Martin Isenburg wrote:
> what needs to happen for this to be resolved? It was my understanding that
> the FastAC author was willing to relicense but that communication stopped
> at one point. Also ... we are currently re-designing the LASzip compressor
> due to the "natural break" in the format.

The FastAC authors need to publish a relicensed release that does allow
for modification, preferable using a common Free Software license. I
suggested BSD-2-Clause because its terms are close to the current FastAC
license and has wide compatibility with other Free Software licenses.

Most of the work is on the shoulders of the FastAC authors, there is no
much we as a community can do other than encourage the relicensing as
soon as possible. I suspect they're just short on time or other
resources to provide this service to the community, hence my suggestion
that funding may allow them to dedicate time to the relicensing.

> http://rapidlasso.com/2015/08/31/riegl-becomes-laszip-sponsor-for-las-1-4-extension/
> 
> This would allow to switch out FastAC for a similarly fast arithmetic range
> coder with a better license. Are you aware of any better
> licensed arithmetic compression schemes in the open source?

I'm only aware of the implementation listed on:

http://www.data-compression.info/Algorithms/AC/

Kind Regards,

Bas

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