After many readings, I'm still confused about the difference of use and the aims of the following tools for LiDAR data processing and manipulation: LAStools, libLAS, and PDAL.
My understanding so far is that PDAL and libLAS have the same overall goals, and that PDAL is slowly replacing libLAS with enhanced performance and more capabilities. I understand that PDAL is a library that is (and want to be) completely independent from LAStools.
The relation between LAStools and libLAS is the most confusing to me. Are they two completely different separate tools? Does LAStools run on top of libLAS?
Does any of these 3 tools/libraries depends on one another?
Background: I have experience with using LAStools, and have played around with PDAL in the past few weeks.
Edit: From a link comment, I learnt that there is also something called LASlib which seems to be something LAStools runs on. I wish this question can gather a comprehensive overview of these tools for people starting off using LiDAR data and being confused what to go with.
Best Answer
The answer by Howard Butler pretty much sums it up. Some more background. When I created the first LAStools and the LASlib library that the tools are build upon I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley and merely needed to prepare LAS files as input for my research on Streaming Delaunay (or Streaming TIN) processing. Because the code seemed useful on its own I zipped it up and published the sources on my Web page in April 2007. It did not have a license because despite having studied Computer Science for 13 years at four different universities I had never learned about how to license source code (Is it on the curriculum at other CS programs?). I was just happy when people used my code. This changed in November 2007 when Howard Butler asked me if he could use LAStools as a starting point for an open source project that would eventually be libLAS.
A few years later - LAStools was more or less a hobby at that point - I lost my job at a high security US lab, was detained for four months in a deportation camp, and eventually deported in handcuffs from the US. This all had to do with my ideas surrounding laser chickens that did not go down well with the nuclear weapons lab I was working at. The "fallout" of this episode set free a lot of energy and resulted in me turning LAStools into a fully featured LiDAR processing suite and LASzip into an industry-strength LiDAR compressor.
In 2012 with LAStools already popular I was able to obtain seed funding from the European Space Agency via one of their Business Incubation Centers. This required me to start a proper company rapidlasso GmbH that would eventually sell commercial and academic licenses to LAStools. At this point LASlib and LASzip also got proper open source licenses (as advised by Howard Butler) which made libLAS somewhat less needed. Then Howard started PDAL (see his answer).
LAStools would probably still be just a hobby project if it were not for US homeland security that keeps you safe from rogue elements like me ... (-; Hope that sheds light from some other angle on the reason why there is LAStools and PDAL and how LASlib, libLAS, and LASzip relate to them.