[Geotiff] BigTIFF Implementation Project - Seeking One Additional Sponsor

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

GeoTIFF has been one of the most successful geospatial imaging formats since
it's inception over ten years ago as an extension to TIFF.

However, the underlying TIFF format suffers from a size limit of 4GB.
As time passes computing resources improve, and image data quantities
balloon.  The 4GB limitations has become an increasing problem for our
industry.

In an effort to rectify this the TIFF user community on the TIFF mailing
list developed a specification for an extension to TIFF to use 64bit offsets
within a new variation of the format now referred to as BigTIFF.  This allows
file sizes up to 18000 petabytes, effectively infinite.  This specification
was developed with input from a variety of sources, including users of the
libtiff library, representatives of Adobe (the owner of the TIFF specification)
and developers of other TIFF codecs.

The BigTIFF specification has been successfully implemented in one proprietary
library from Aware Systems.  However, the libtiff development team has not been
able to find the several months of development time required to implement
support for BigTIFF in the libtiff library (used by libgeotiff, GDAL,
MapServer, etc).

Joris van Damme of Aware Systems (also a frequent contributor to libtiff and
the TIFF mailing list) has agreed to implement a BigTIFF upgrade for libtiff
if reasonable financial support can be found for the project.  To that
end the "BigTIFF Sponsorship" effort was launched.  It is described at:

   http://libtiff.maptools.org/BigTIFFProposal.html

So far we have been quite successful and have secured commitments from three
of four needed sponsors, each for an amount of $6000 USD towards the project.
This email is a solicitation for one final sponsor for the same amount so that
we can launch the development project in February.

The proposal page above covers the details, but the gist is that the project
will result in a libtiff 4.0 circa July 2007 that will support reading
traditional TIFF files, as well as BigTIFF files, and will support writing
either variant.  This capability will flow through to users of the GDAL
library, MapServer and libgeotiff.

This is an appeal from me then for one additional organization in our
industry to step forward to support this important infrastructural project.

In addition to the technical benefits this project will bring, I believe
the project press release will also bring a reputational benefit to all the
sponsors.

Please contact myself or Joris van Damme if you are interested in taking
the last sponsorship position so that we can launch the project on time.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    |