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Free Lossless Image Format

flif.info

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Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#71

Why all the hate for GPLv3?

Sharing code is no longer cool if people have to share back. Or at least so it seems.

The GPL-hate in here really is quite immense, even though time and time again, RMS has been shown to be right about his stance on freedom.

Should we attribute it to people's desire for a quick ("free") fix over long term considerations?

It's hard to tell, but I suspect the silicon valley influence here doesn't help. There everyone wants to take everyone else's hard work and code, build a weekend SaaS and get rich. The GPL, while not preventing that, is clearly in opposition to that goal.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, starting with an unusable license with the intention to switch to a more practical one later is a weird strategy. I guess that's one way to discourage people from adopting it before it's ready. (Edit: As I clarified, I meant usable for adoption in other non-GPL projects. But OK, I deserve the downvotes for adding very little, and will think twice before posting such a reply next time)

>unusable license Pure bullshit. Unusable for whom? Proprietary software developers? That's the intent.

You agreeing with the intent does not negate the effect.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#74
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...

you don't have to use the code, you can (and probably want to) implement the code yourself.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#75

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…

This would be great. A lot of "responsive" sites nowadays use only one image as well, the highest resolution available. So you are downloading that 4K jpeg whether you are on mobile or on a desktop.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

JPEG 2000 is capable of compressing 1969x1307 images without issues. I work with JPEG 2000 codecs every day. It is commonly used in Virtual Microscopy with images in the tens of gigabytes as well as with small 256x256 MRI. I don't know why the author does not present "JPEG 2000 at this size".

Edit: I was confused since with most coders you can specify precise mean squared error optimal truncation points (called quality layers) and it should have been very easy to obtain a stream of any particular file size.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#77

Why all the hate for GPLv3?

Sharing code is no longer cool if people have to share back. Or at least so it seems. The GPL-hate in here really is quite immense, even though time and time again, RMS has been shown to be right about his stance on freedom. Should we attribute it to people's desire for a quick ("free") fix over long term considerations? It's hard to tell, but I suspect the silicon valley influence here doesn't help. There everyone w…

As someone who made a negative comment about the GPL elsewhere in this thread, I think I'll comment. I have absolutely nothing against the GPL, and use it myself. However, using the GPL for a library seems like a bad idea, because there are a lot of people, especially at companies, which won't touch the GPL. So if you license a library GPL and it's useful someone is just going to come along and reimplement it with a more liberal license. And such a waste of resources is sad to contemplate.

The ideal of the GPL was that it would force other projects to switch to GPL, but it doesn't seem to happen too much in practice because the modern world has an abundance of alternative software for any task. Think long term: chances are someone in the next 50 years will be annoyed enough to reimplement whatever you're doing.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#78
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...

Very, very hard. I don't see why they didn't use LGPL, as GPL will greatly increase the barrier to adoption.

You see how unsupported WebP is at the moment. Simply having a better compression ratio isn't gonna cut it.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#80

Why all the hate for GPLv3?

If you want to your code to always be free, GPL is a good choice. If your want your code to be used by everyone, including e.g. all large browsers, you really need a permissive license.

Just imagine if SQLite was GPL-only, barely anybody would use it.

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