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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | RE: [gislist] Seeking Opinions on Lizardtech's MrSID |
| Date: |
11/07/2003 07:25:00 AM |
| From: |
Ted Cisine |
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We use ESRI's Arc Explorer 2 for MrSID. Works better for us than the
Lizardtech product.
Ted
_____________________________
Ted Cisine
GIS Manager
Robeson County Tax Administration
Lumberton, North Carolina
ted.cisine@co.robeson.nc.us
_____________________________
-----Original Message-----
From: gislist-bounces@lists.geocomm.com
[mailto:gislist-bounces@lists.geocomm.com]On Behalf Of Dimitri Rotow
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 6:26 PM
To: gislist@lists.geocomm.com
Subject: RE: [gislist] Seeking Opinions on Lizardtech's MrSID
> In our view, these are nearly extortionist schemes, since they
> control the bulk of the market in image compression.
>
> We were wondering if anyone else out there has a problem with
> these practices, and what, if anything you plan to do about it.
> Will you move to the new GeoJP2 or something else?
>
My guess is that many people share your view since otherwise LizardTech
would not have run into such deep financial problems that doomed their
company: they burned through $50 million in venture capital money (according
to GIS Monitor), and at the end were reduced to laying off most of their
employees and selling their remaining assets to a Japanese company. This is
failure on a massive scale.
Readers of this list know that manifold.net, despite supporting over 80
other formats, never supported MrSID for two reasons: 1) the anticompetitive
and in our view bogus legal attack on ERMapper attempted by LizardTech and
2) the unusual anticompetitive provisions of the MrSID SDK agreement. Both
items suggested to us that LizardTech had so little faith in its MrSID
technology that they did not want to risk competition in the open
marketplace but would rather attempt through legal action to deny people the
freedom of choosing an alternative.
I had hoped this would change and at least the SDK would be available in a
more industry standard form, without any of the bizarre anticompetition
provisions. But, that did not happen before the end of LizardTech as an
independent entity. The current managers holding MrSID format hostage
appear no more aware than the former LizardTech managers that a very closed
format is not the formula for success.
For example, I don't see how any public entity can continue providing images
in MrSID format without a free viewer provided by the company. I guarantee
you that without a free viewer it is only a matter of time before various
state agencies currently keeping images in MrSID format will be sued under
various state and federal public access laws. If they had a free viewer
they might avoid such litigation but without it there's no way to justify
publication in a highly proprietary, locked-down format that is surrounded
by such extraordinarily anticompetitive legal provisions as occur with
MrSID.
It's clear that many users of MrSID now realize that not only is the format
held hostage by its new owners, they as users are being held hostage as
well. There is an easy solution for all this: switch to ECW. It's a good
format as I can attest from personal experience.
Manifold has always included the unlimited read, 500MB write ECW SDK and
with the next update , manifold.net will support the unlimited-size
read/write ECW SDK from ERMapper. This is by far the preferred technical
and business alternative to MrSID. We will support all ECW features,
including image fetching through net gateways.
Early next year I expect we will participate in an "Image Rescue" campaign
now being informally discussed within the public and private GIS community
to rescue images trapped in MrSID format and to convert them to open ECW
format. Part of Image Rescue will be a set of free and open tools that will
enable mass conversion of images from MrSID format into ECW format.
ERMapper has a very confident and open licensing agreement for their ECW SDK
and very widespread support within the independent software vendor
community. Clearly, ECW is a far more "open" format than MrSID.
I could be wrong about this, but my guess is that if people have very low
cost or free tools for achieving image compression that is superior to MrSID
in all ways, that if they have free tools to easily rescue images now
trapped in MrSID format and if they have an open ECW standard supported with
a wide array of development tools from many different vendors, well,... who
in their right mind would voluntarily continue wearing a sack over their
head and manacles on their arms and legs and a financial drain on their
budget by using MrSID?
Cheers,
Dimitri
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