The LAS format, the ASPRS, and the „LAZ clone“ by ESRI

We are concerned about ESRI’s next moves in forcing yet another proprietary format into wide-spread deployment. Forwarded emails, retold conversations, and personal experiences suggest that sneaky tactics are being used to disrupt the harmony in open LiDAR formats that we have enjoyed for many years.

Some time has passed since we broke the news about the proprietary „LAZ clone“ by ESRI. We were expecting the ASPRS to eventually comment on the issue. ESRI is promoting their lock-in product by the name of the open LAS specification (for which the ASPRS holds the copyright) calling their closed format „Optimized LAS„. We have been asked (in various forums) about the position of the ASPRS on this issue. ESRI’s use of LAS (*) makes it seem as if their „LAZ clone“ was somehow an ASPRS thing (as evidenced by Harold’s comment). Despite ESRI’s media-blah-blah about “open and interoperable” they are – once again – luring the geospatial community to fall for a new proprietary format. So far the ASPRS has not released a statement on ESRI’s closed version of the LAS format.

The LAS Working Group (LWG) is part of the Lidar Division of the ASPRS. It has been maintaining the evolving LAS format from its 1.0 version that was (apparently as early as 1998) created by the LiDAR industry’s pioneers and eventually donated to the ASPRS (more recent LAS history is linked here). The good and early decisions of the LWG have created an incredible successful open data exchange standard for discrete LiDAR points that is nowadays supported by practically every software. „Kudos“ to the original members for this achievement.

We did not join the LWG until 2011 to help avoid broken compatibility in LAS 1.4. After weathering the following „laser storm of 2011“ the working group has been rather quiet. Its most recent activity was in 2013 for tendering the development of an official ASPRS LAS Validation Suite (LVS) that eventually resulted in ‚lasvalidate‚  – an open source LAS validator.

So who is this LWG? And why are they not commenting on such an important controvery like this „LAZ clone“ with the seductive name „Optimized LAS“? The latest document on the Web pages of the LAS Working Group (LWG) lists the following people as members:

This list from 2011 is hopelessly out of date, but it should give you an idea of the composition of the LWG. Most likely rapidlasso is still a member of the LWG but it is hard to tell because there have not been any emails recently and because there are no regular meetings. In the past we had some real bad luck with bringing up issues directly with the LWG, so here we go:

Dear ASPRS and LWG,
we are the guardians of the open LiDAR data exchange
specification, the LAS format. What is our response
to the proprietary format called "Optimized LAS" that
is being agressively promoted by ESRI?

Dear concerned ASPRS member,
how would you like your organization to respond now
that a large geospatial company uses its dominance
to push a closed format into the market, sabotaging
the accomplishments of an open data exchange standard
maintained by the ASPRS.

We are worried that ESRI – beyond lobbying agencies to convert their current holdings to the proprietary „LAZ clone“ or to tender future deliveries in the closed zLAS format – may also be trying to form strategic alliances with vendors of popular LiDAR processing packages. Many of these vendors are also members of the LAS Working Group and would be in a conflict-of-interest if they were to „sell out“ to ESRI’s lock-in ambitions.

You can imagine the red flag that went up a few days ago when we saw a technical comment on a LinkedIn post by Gene Roe that suggested intimate familiarity with the capabilities of the „LAZ clone“ by Lewis Graham who has been leading the LAS effort since 1998 and who is the chair of the LAS Working Group. That Lewis‘ comment has since been removed did little to calm our worries. As a side note: Gene’s posts being titled „LAS Data Format“ further dilutes the difference between open LAS and closed zLAS.

Please inform us (or comment below) about any lobbying you hear about. Given the agressive moves by ESRI – in face of our repeated attempts to reach out – we do not think we can afford to err on the side of caution any longer … (-;

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(*) It is fair to note that our products such as LAStools, LASlib, and LASzip also use the name „LAS“. This is for historic reasons. That is what we called the simple package for reading, writing, and processing LAS files we created back in 2005 for our own research before releasing them as open source in 2007. During our postdoc years at UC Berkeley we did not anticipate that these tools would become so or that we would start a company a few years later …