Licensing LAStools

[kristina....@gmail.com]

Hello all,

I have some confusion about licensing lastools.

I am a bachelors student at a university in germany and I am working on SFM pointclouds for my thesis. I downloaded the lastools using the download button on the rapidlasso main page. Thus, i ssumed it to be open source.

Reading the LICENSE.txt I realized that certain tools require a license but they ARE available to me already without paying anything. Do I need to buy a license nonetheless?

 

Thank you very much and warm regards,

 

Kristina Gumgowski

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Kristina,

Thanks for you interest in LAStools for your research endeavors. The white noise for the unlicensed tools is very low. It's mainly to prevent commercial entities or government agencies from using LAStools for client deliveries and production work without a license and - as an academic, a researcher or a hobby user - you can work around the limit by creating smaller tiles and then stitching them back together with GDAL ... (-:

For academic or private users (aka university researchers, hobby folks, and educators) also the license protected closed source tools are free to use as long as you can live with the point limitations (aka added noise and black diagonals) that start - depending on the tool - at around 1 ~ 15 million points.

Academics, researchers, and educators who are not doing production work can obtain a cheap laboratory-wide *FULL* university license (without point number restrictions) for EUR 2000 (universities or community colleges) or EUR 3000 (government research agencies). This can be used by *all* of the students for research publications and student assignments and training, etc ... just not for actual production work. More info: http://lastools.org/LICENSE.txt

Make sure you also check out our facebook pages where there is lots of LiDAR fun to be had:

http://facebook.com/LAStools
http://facebook.com/rapidlasso
http://facebook.com/LaserPulseWaves

What do you need to do? If you need to quality check your LiDAR or create ground-classifications, find buildings, create polygonal boundaries, density maps, biomass rasters, canopy maps, DTMs, DSM, ... from massive LiDAR then a batch-scripted LAStools processing pipeline running on multi-cores is certainly good option to use. See these core tutorials (there are many more on our blog) for how to realize this:

http://rapidlasso.com/2013/04/20/tutorial-quality-checking/
http://rapidlasso.com/2013/10/13/tutorial-lidar-preparation/
http://rapidlasso.com/2013/10/20/tutorial-derivative-production/
http://rapidlasso.com/2014/03/02/tutorial-manual-lidar-editing/
http://rapidlasso.com/2014/09/02/six-new-video-tutorials-on-lastools/

Regards,

Martin @rapidlasso

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