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Free Lossless Image Format

flif.info

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Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#111

Post by antientropic »

dagw wrote: post #69
yiyus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Studying GPL'ed source code does not "taint" anything. You're absolutely allowed to do that. If you're really concerned about subconsciously copying elements of the original into your implementation, you could let somebody else study the original and write a spec.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#112

Post by tfinniga »

This is an exciting development.

I think the concerns about the licensing are a bit premature - honestly, this is currently a research project, not a practical replacement for existing image formats. The licensing is only one of several impediments to adoption.

- The format has no spec

- The format may change, rendering all previous images unreadable

- The format has no javascript implementation, and no way of running on old browsers.

- As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a patent search done to see if it violates other patents from other organizations. For example, this one: http://www.google.com/patents/US7982641

- No peer-reviewed paper published yet?

However that doesn't mean that we can't recognize the accomplishment - this looks like a very promising research result, and I hope the project continues! Good work Jon!

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#114

Post by cwyers »

ekianjo wrote: post #90
digi_owl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPLv3 will be a hard sell...

Jon Sneyers is a known advocate of Free Software, I am actually glad he acts on his beliefs.

Based on how he's acted in the past, I think even Stallman would've advocated something like the MIT or BSD license for something like this -- having a patent-unencumbered alternative to formats like JPEG 2000 being used seems to be more important to a lot of Free Software people. In other words, the advantage of having widely-used file formats that are accessible to free software programs are considered greater than the benefits of having software become libre in order to use GPL'd file format libraries. Stallman defended the use of a non-copyleft license for Ogg/Vorbis on those grounds:

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#115

Post by hansjorg »

colanderman wrote: post #92
rplnt wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Progressive JPEG has supported this for decades. Anyone over 25 should remember them from dial-up years.

I think the suggestion is that the client could just stop downloading at a set threshold, maybe taking current bandwidth, cost, etc. into consideration.

Judging from the video, something like that could work very well (and much better than with progressive jpegs).

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#116

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#117

Post by issaria »

ekianjo wrote: post #93
lt wrote: post #6

This is really interesting! There seems to be some additional technical information here: https://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18485-free-lossless-ima... - for interlacing it uses a generalization of PNG's Adam7; unlike PNG, the geometry of the 2D interlacing is exploited heavily to get better pixel estimation, which means the overhead of interlacing is small (vs simple scanline encoding, which has the benefit of loc…

I posted the news of this new file format weeks ago on HN, no one picked it up :P

Did you remember to put "Free" on the title?

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#119

Post by est »

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 has something cooler, you can first load a black-white smaller picture, then load more color and more detail.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#120

Post by [deleted] »

legulere wrote: post #55
bildung wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, starting with an unusable license If you want to use it commercially without publishing source, just buy a licence from the author. Buying licences isn't exactly uncommon. Or are OS X/iOS/Windows also unusable for you?

The author claims it to be royalty free. Also commercial "standards" by one party are worthless

[deleted]
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