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Free Lossless Image Format

flif.info

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Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#141

Post by snuxoll »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #83
versteegen wrote: post #37

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)

Starting with a more restrictive one leaves his options open; moving from restrictive to liberal is a lot easier than moving from liberal to restrictive.

Erm, what? If you have ANY contributors other than your core project team going from a restrictive to a more liberal license requires agreement from all of them, as they ALL have copyright somewhere in the project.

The opposite, going from something like MIT or BSD doesn't require ANYONE to be okay with it, the license permits it.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#142

Post by ChuckMcM »

emergentcypher wrote: post #65

Why all the hate for GPLv3?

Perhaps it is simply that GPL3 asks much in exchange for what would be a small piece of a larger project. Kind of like asking people to give you their email address and phone number so they can use the shopping cart at the store.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#143

Post by GhotiFish »

versteegen wrote: post #21
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…

Great, thanks. It seems there is no technical description available anywhere beyond what you quoted. They haven't written it up, and I couldn't even find comments in the source providing details. That's too bad, but he (I assume that's Jon Sneyers) does say he hopes to write it up later. Also, comments in that thread on speed [1]: In terms of encode/decode speed: both are slow and not very optimized at the moment (no…

awesome, thanks for the info! if flif does ultimately consume more CPU resources then that is a trade off I'm perfectly happy to make, I'd rather burn CPU than my heinously bandwidth capped internet.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#144

Post by bmm6o »

guelo wrote: post #103
dtech wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sharing code is no longer cool if people have to share back. Or at least so it seems. There are plenty of licenses which require/encourage that. The problem with GPL is that everything that touches the GPL code has to become GPL or compatible. Adobe for example will never put this in Photoshop, or Microsoft in Internet Explorer, as they do not want to GPL their software. Net result is no wide support for this image…

That's the whole point of GPL. To move people away from closed source by having a sperate ecosystem that cannot be contaminated. The problem is that the ecosystem hasn't been that compelling besides a few things such as Linux.

That's fine as a long-term goal, but it's pretty directly in conflict with the short-term goal of getting support for this image format into all browsers. If you want this in e.g. IE, someone will have to re-implement it with a license compatible with IE. And there will be compatibility bugs, non feature-parity, etc.

I mean, I get it if you'd like closed-source browsers to go away. You're entitled to that position. But that's not the effect that making this library GPL will have.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#145

Post by nevir »

ebbv wrote: post #87
emergentcypher wrote: post #65

Why all the hate for GPLv3?

The HN crowd tends to be a bit more money oriented than some of us older coders.

As a younger coder who has worked at the bigger firms that disallow use of GPL code in projects (Amazon, Google) - it is a huge disappointment to find a quality library that is GPL:

There are plenty of projects at these companies that would be unreasonable to open source - and due to frequent reuse of code within a company, GPL is an unreasonable license due to its ripple effect.

Contributing back to open source projects is the most enjoyable part of the process (Google for example, actively encourages this, and makes it incredibly easy).

GPL projects are dramatically reducing their pool of potential contributors. I'd love to contribute to them, but I can't.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#146

Post by snuxoll »

davexunit wrote: post #62
brianwawok wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LGPLv3 will still prevent use of Windows Phone, iOS and Android.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#147

Post by robert_foss »

jobigoud wrote: post #128
robert_foss wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of this project which is yet to have a finalized specification I think the GPL is an ideal format. As a project it is important to have access to all of the pieces and avoiding incompatible forks of different kinds in the early stages. So for the purpose of developing a 'golden standard' prototype for FLIF, I don't think a non-GPL license would have served them better. The author seems to have the same…

> If a company wants get something for free, expecting it to publish source code changes is not an actually high threshold. Obviously the issue is not about publishing changes to the library, it's about publishing the rest of the source which just uses the library as a building block.

You're free to link to compiled GPL libraries. There is nothing forcing you to change the license of your product unless you intend to integrate the sourcecode.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#148

Post by bryanlarsen »

snuxoll wrote: post #141
bryanlarsen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting with a more restrictive one leaves his options open; moving from restrictive to liberal is a lot easier than moving from liberal to restrictive.

Erm, what? If you have ANY contributors other than your core project team going from a restrictive to a more liberal license requires agreement from all of them, as they ALL have copyright somewhere in the project. The opposite, going from something like MIT or BSD doesn't require ANYONE to be okay with it, the license permits it.

There's only one author, that's not the problem.

My point was, if he had released his code as MIT/BSD and then wanted to change it to GPL it would be fairly ineffective -- people could still use the old MIT/BSD version in their proprietary products.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#149

Post by antirez »

One would expect, in theory, Google to push this like mad, based on what they did with HTTP 2.0 in another part of the stack, for possibly less gain at the cost of much more complexity and standards shaking. Let's hope it really happens.
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