Comments regarding laszip_2.2.0-1_amd64.changes

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 03/17/2018 05:32 PM, Martin Landa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2018-03-17 17:25 GMT+01:00 Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic at xs4all.nl>:
>> On 03/17/2018 05:21 PM, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
>>> Don't upload laszip to UbuntuGIS or any other PPA, due to the FastAC
>>> code not allowing modification the laszip package is unredistributable
>>> because it violets the terms of the LGPL.
>>
>> I see that you uploaded it to ubuntugis-experimental already, so I
>> deleted that package since we're not allowed to distribute the package
>> in it current form.
> 
> sorry, I didn't know about that. Thanks for pointing this out!

For some more background, see:

 https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeolive/ticket/1341

>>> If you want to support LAZ in PDAL for GRASS getting laz-perf packages
>>> is a much better option:
> 
> GRASS still relies on liblas. There are new GRASS modules based on
> PGAL, but not really finished.

libLAS is not actively developed any more, it's highly unlike to ever
see another release.

PDAL is the way forward for LAS support in OSGeo project. And thanks for
Howard, there is now an alternative to LASzip which doesn't have license
issues.

The LASzip saga has been a very disappointing experience, Martin talks
big about how LAZ is better dan ESRI's format, but did do any work to
resolve the license issues in LASzip which was the only open source
implementation.

I know that the PDAL support in GRASS is still in the early stages, I've
never been able to successfully build the grass Debian package with PDAL
support. I'd love to be able to do that, though, and not have to disable
it when PDAL publishes a new release (as it took quite a while for GRASS
to support PDAL 1.6.0).

Kind Regards,

Bas