Comments on: MrSID SDK Improvements

By: crschmidt

crschmidt — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:02:26 +0000

I agree with every part of that statement except for ‘new’; depending on your definition of ‘free’. (Freedom, or zero cost?)

There have been zero-cost tools to do this with MrSID for many years. It still isn’t ‘free’ software, where free == freedom/libre.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t worth using, just that it is not open source.

By: fmatz

fmatz — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:03:27 +0000

There is a new LizardTech GeoViewer to view MrSID for free.
Also you can convert MrSID to GeoTIFF, JPEG and PNG.

By: crschmidt

crschmidt — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:42:19 +0000

Sure. It’s still proprietary software, and in some cases, you may have to pay to use it, but it’s a nice library that does something a lot of people need.

By: Tom MacWright

Tom MacWright — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:23:20 +0000

Note that the MrSID SDK can’t be distributed with GDAL on lots of systems because of licensing restrictions, and that you apparently have to create an account and agree to a TOS to download it. Now, LizardTech is certainly more open to open source than ESRI, but that’s basically the same as saying ‘they don’t actively hate open source.’

By: Zoom - The LizardTech Community Blog » Blog Archive » Post-sprint reflections

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:23:00 +0000

[...] the grace to blush just a little, we’re not too modest to nonetheless link to Chris’ stirring post on using GDAL with our [...]

By: STH

STH — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:18:14 +0000

But can you for FREE create MrSid files? If NO, then I suggest to use ECW instead. Or even better JPEG-compressed GeoTIFFs with overviews for “close to no” quality loss.