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Free Lossless Image Format

flif.info

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Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#61

Post by lucian1900 »

davexunit wrote: post #45
aaronharnly wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree – using GPL rather than LGPL or BSD in the reference implementation will prevent this from being widely adopted. UPDATE: See lt's helpful comment above.

So, the free world can use this library and the proprietary world will have to develop their own if they want to use the format. Proprietary software developers get to piggy back off of tons of free software, and then when someone decides that they don't want to enable that for their particular program/library, people complain about it. It makes no sense.

No open source software can use this unless it is already GPLv3. Most of it isn't.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#62

Post by davexunit »

brianwawok wrote: post #59
davexunit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the free world can use this library and the proprietary world will have to develop their own if they want to use the format. Proprietary software developers get to piggy back off of tons of free software, and then when someone decides that they don't want to enable that for their particular program/library, people complain about it. It makes no sense.

I think license depends on your goal. If your goal is to create a web image format.. you need all the browsers to agree to include you. All browsers will not add a GPLv3 image type. Therefore it is dead before it launched.

The author has expressed interest in dual-licensing, so there will probably still be options. GPLv3+ or LGPLv3+ sounds reasonable.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#63

Post by baldfat »

pmelendez wrote: post #16
baldfat wrote: post #9

I don't see any foundations or corporations backing this project. Without support (I hope something like this does gain wide scale support (SVG in browsers for the Internet please already!) I don't see this being accepted.

What you say it's true for a wide scale usage. However, imagine a small company, startup, or a sole developer using this for their projects or as a internal format. I found it very interesting even if there is not a widespread use of it.

It is interesting! I agree but I guess I am getting to old. I keep hearing awesome new formats and than they just waste away. The few success stories are few and in between. FLAC and OGG are a good example. OGG is a decent format and I prefer it to MP3 but it really just withered. FLAC is awesome but it is far from main stream. Heck even SVG is far from where it SHOULD be.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#64

Post by anon4 »

digi_owl wrote: post #42
rwinn wrote: post #19

Wow! Higher compression than any other format, full transparency support, progressive/partial loading AND animations?! I can't wait for this to get widespread adoption! Github repo here btw: https://github.com/jonsneyers/FLIF

GPLv3 will be a hard sell...

I suppose (hope) that once they finalise the format, we'll have tools released with free, unencumbered licenses.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#66

Post by nstart »

yiyus wrote: post #38
alphabetam wrote: post #32

GPL 3. Meaning it won't ever be adopted by anyone.

IANAL, but I guess the file format itself is not covered by the GPL 3, only the reference implementation. They specifically say that "FLIF is completely royalty-free and it is not encumbered by software patents". So, I suppose people will be allowed to develop their own libraries with another license.

They also go on to say. That might be a clear indication that this is in fact GPL v3.

FLIF is Free Software. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or any later version. That means you get the “four freedoms”:

    The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
    The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
    The freedom to redistribute copies.
    The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#67

Post by donlzx »

I hope the idea of progressive downloading partials can be applied to other files types as well.

For example, if commonly used libraries such as minified Javascript source files are encoded and distributed incrementally, we don't have to repetitively download various versions of the same library from different CDNs for different websites, which will save a huge amount of Web traffic.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#68

Post by espadrine »

linkydinkandyou wrote: post #47
iraphael wrote: post #23

This is really interesting. One of the most interesting parts is the progressive decoding/responsive images. http://flif.info/example.php (go to the bottom of the page). Basically, the last example shows that, if you want a scaled version of the image, you can simply stop decompressing. No need for multiple image files. Just create one with very high quality and decompress until you get the quality you want and scale…

JPEG 2000 has that same feature. FLIF claims it will beat the lossless compression ratio of JPEG 2000

It also claims to beat the lossy version, which cannot even be encoded for the transparent fish image at the tested file sizes: http://flif.info/example.php

[ed. image size → file size to emphasize that they had a target byte count for the purpose of comparison]

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#69

Post by dagw »

yiyus wrote: post #38
alphabetam wrote: post #32

GPL 3. Meaning it won't ever be adopted by anyone.

IANAL, but I guess the file format itself is not covered by the GPL 3, only the reference implementation. They specifically say that "FLIF is completely royalty-free and it is not encumbered by software patents". So, I suppose people will be allowed to develop their own libraries with another license.

True, but the only complete documentation of the file format I found was the source code of the reference implementation. So the only way to write a new implementation is to study the reference implementation, which will make your new implementation "tainted".

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#70

Post by stephencanon »

yiyus wrote: post #38
alphabetam wrote: post #32

GPL 3. Meaning it won't ever be adopted by anyone.

IANAL, but I guess the file format itself is not covered by the GPL 3, only the reference implementation. They specifically say that "FLIF is completely royalty-free and it is not encumbered by software patents". So, I suppose people will be allowed to develop their own libraries with another license.

No documented format (actually an explicit acknowledgement that the format will likely change). The implementation is the spec, the implementation is GPLv3, so many companies lawyers will prevent engineers even looking at it to write a clean-room implementation.
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