Hobu, Inc.

When I first started working with GDAL, MrSID images were all about, and it looked like it was becoming the emergent standard for wavelet compressed geospatial imagery. I railed and complained rather loudly when I found out that I couldn’t just download the DSDK and start working with the imagery. Eventually (I don’t know if my squawking actually had any impact), LizardTech made the DSDK available for free download (requiring registration and EULA reading), but the DSDK had some somewhat onerous clauses in its license that prevented packages like FWTools, MS4W, QGIS, and GRASS from distributing the DSDK libraries. This left users in a tough spot and placed extra burden on developers to repackage software in such a way that “plugin” approaches could be used (individual users had to download the DSDK themselves and set some magic switches).

Michael Gerlek of LizardTech sat next to myself and Frank Warmerdam at the Februrary 4th bootstrapping meeting of OSGeo. We took the opportunity to describe some of the issues we had with the DSDK license and how it caused hang-ups for purveyors of binary builds. Later, as LizardTech was preparing for the latest release of the DSDK, Michael contacted Frank and I so we could describe the issues we had.

• Allow the redistribution of DLLs, .so’s, .libs, and include files so things like the “buildkit” can be distributed with the DSDK. The MapServer Buildkit allows users to build MapServer/GDAL on Windows with MSVC 2003 by providing most things pre-compiled/configured so folks can tweak the options that they need in MapServer/GDAL.
• Focus sections about promoting and branding MrSID to be specific about the browser plugin, not the entire DSDK.

Expect to see the MrSID DSDK distributed widely with your favorite Open Source GIS tools in the coming months….

Head to http://developer.lizardtech.com to get a copy if your interested.

PS. LizardTech, please ship the source code to the DSDK so we can compile it for all sorts of weird platforms and give you bug reports

My initial outrage in that post was about LizardTech swallowing up an infant company called Mapping Science that was working to develop the GeoJP2 standard. My complaints were that the move was intended to create confusion in the market place and limit the uptake of JPEG2000 in the GIS market place. To some extent this may have been true (confusion about JPEG2000 and the difference between a compressor and a format), but the marketplace has changed quite a bit since then.

An interesting data point is that very soon after my little weblog post, the DSDK (decompression software development kit) became free for use. So while they are now generally available, they also use very old compilers and aren’t available for all platforms. Give us an inch and we want a mile!

Reptiles don’t generate their own body heat

LizardTech chose to compete with their technology in the courtroom rather than in the cubicle. They agressively pursued ER Mapper as far as they could in their patent dispute rather than settling or out-competing them with technology. Their move to per-MB compression fees of their next generation of technology sucked all of the wind out of their existing format, pushing people to look for ways to get around it — compressing less MBs, not upgrading, or looking to things like ECW.

LizardTech 2.0

Things appear to be changing though. A really curious development is one of the initial members of the OSGeo Foundation is Michael Gerlek from LizardTech. The LizardTech toolkit has been a big consumer of Open Source software (as I’ve noticed from debugging library linking issues related to popular toolkits like GDAL and libtiff). ER Mapper has already released its software in an Open Source-friendly way (dual-licensed actually). Is LizardTech preparing to do the same?

LizardTech seems to have ended their appeals process against ER Mapper. Is this geospatial industry saga really over?

I hope LizardTech has turned the corner and is working hard to win back the trust of developers and GIS practicioners, make their lives easier, and make LizardTech technology be a sensible, reasonable, sustainable, and affordable choice for imagery compression. Their recent move into JPEG2000 as a primary format is a great one, and I am excited that they are working to separate the compressor from the format in the way that they are. I am hopeful that LizardTech’s involvement in OSGeo might mean some Open Source LizardTech stuff as well.