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OSGeo Foundation Up In Arms Over ESRI LAS Lock-In Plans
Bismillah writes: The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is outraged over mapping giant ESRI's latest move which entails vendor lock-in for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data through its proprietary Optimised LAS format. ESRI is the dominant company in the geospatial data arena, with its ArcGIS mapping platform boasting with over a million users and 350,000 customers.
No, but as soon as the Market leader does propagate a new data exchange format, the actual creators of the data (commercial companies as well as state agencies) will follow. ESRIs market share is dominating and unfortunately many GIS users are not interested in open tools. So if a more efficient and comfortable format will be available then the GIS community will willingly accept it - without even considering the problems of a further lock in. In addition to that, the Open Source Geo community is already providing the LASzip format for the same functionality and that format is far superior to the classic one and probably as efficient as the one ESRI is developing - plus it is open, documented and all, albeit so far not subjected to the process of standardization.