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Libtiff goes offline

madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com

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Re: Libtiff goes offline

#21

Post by cornellwright »

banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

Tiff is very useful because it lets you do almost anything. A tiff image is just several arrays of numbers, you decide how many bits, signed, unsigned, float, int, etc.

This is very helpful for processing which treats each pixel as a sample of the scene, such as computational microscopy or remote sensing. I've always wondered if that had something to do with why it was hosted at remotesensing.org.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#22

Post by tomc1985 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #20
banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

IIRC, it's used a lot for black-and-white images without a lot of photographic detail (schematics, etc.)

Digital negative storage for photography

Texture data for some videogames

Portable format for layered composites (a la Photoshop)

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#23

Post by SwellJoe »

noobermin wrote: post #11

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors. What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever thi…

That place existed in the past, too: https://sf.net

The question is, can we trust an entity like that to remain trustworthy through decades? Turns out SF.net wasn't trustworthy through all of that time, even if they were in the beginning, and seem to be sincerely trying to be trustworthy again. So, if we put all of our eggs in one basket, we better be really confident of that basket. We could have lost every OSS project website, rather than just one, if an entity that we trust today becomes untrustworthy tomorrow.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#24

Post by acdha »

matthuggins wrote: post #17
cooper12 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's commonly used as an archival format since it's not lossy like jpeg.

JPEG is commonly used in its lossy format, but there's lossless JPEG[1] as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

Application support is pretty huge, though: that's what effectively turned JPEG 2000 into a niche format since the standard was patent and license encumbered for the first decade and change and the vendors didn't make interoperability a priority because they assumed the technical merits would force everyone to adopt it in the end. When you're talking about lossless, however, it's often in the context of archival storage and people get spooked after they encounter files which they have trouble opening with perfect fidelity.

It's a shame since the compression technology was impressive and j2k would also have made a great progressive image format had browsers supported it.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#25

Post by bane »

Mizza wrote: post #13
noobermin wrote: post #11

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors. What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever thi…

GitHub will rot some day as well. (I think we're already seeing it start to decline.) This is simply a permanent problem. Archive.org and to a lesser extent IPFS are viable solutions for archiving, but _contingency_ plans are I think the missing component here. Pray for the best but prepare for the worst.

You know, come to think of it, Archive.org is sorta kinda the right place to store these things. If they offered source code control they would both get the source as well as the path to the latest version all at once, which could be an invaluable historic record.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#26

Post by jdub »

wyldfire wrote: post #12

/me cringes in fear of a left-pad moment -- what distros can't be built now? Only half joking. ;)

Any distro that complies with the GPL will generalise its requirements to everything else, and thus host original sources for every single package. :-)

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#27

Post by niccaluim »

banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

It's popular in mapping because it can be georeferenced. https://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#28

Post by jcrawfordor »

noobermin wrote: post #11

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors. What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever thi…

I'm no Stallman, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with how readily everyone is accepting (and encouraging) GitHub as the complete overlord of open-source software. As already pointed out, Sourceforge is a cautionary tale of how these services can go very wrong due to business issues. There's also a much larger philosophical issue with basing the open-source economy on a proprietary platform with no particular intent of open-sourcing its core software.

Yes, GH does a lot of things right, including generally making it easy to export data form their apps in a reasonably vendor-neutral form. But what happens when GH runs into financial trouble like SF did? Do we want just about every project out there to have to struggle to do something with their GitHub issues?

There are issues with having open-source projects maintain their own infrastructure, but I think it's the right thing to do wherever possible. It makes them truly independent in a way that a GitHub repo can never be.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#29

Post by forgettableuser »

banachtarski wrote: post #7

Tiff? That is a format I haven't heard in a long time. edit: to everyone replying. TIFF is awful. We have lossless compression now (read PNG) which is at least a billion times better. We shouldn't use it for anything in this day and age. Hell, just DEFLATE your TIFF and call it a new format. It will be better than TIFF

TIFF is still used in the Apple ecosystems. It got a mini-rebirth recently when Apple started doing retina displays. TIFF has the ability to store multiple images, which Apple has latched onto to allow different images to be used for different resolution screens.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#30

Post by fucking_tragedy »

noobermin wrote: post #11

For important projects like this (libjpeg, libpng and others) it would make sense if there was sort of place to get all of them apart from mirrors. What am I saying, that place[0] exists. Developers shouldn't have to shoulder the burden of hosting their code if they don't want to or don't wish to weather the expense. It certainly seems in this case they couldn't pay for self-hosting (or friend-hosting or whatever thi…

> What am I saying, that place[0] exists

One day, this will have only existed. Until then, they should host the repository on Google Code.

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