Libtiff goes offline

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:38 AM UTC

jcrawfordor wrote: post #28

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 o…

Post by jen20 » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:43 AM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #31

Mizza wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think we're seeing a Github decline. Yes they've had some internal strife not all that connected to business, but Google just moved a lot of its OSS there, Microsoft just moved a bunch of stuff there. Git repos take a single command line statement to move, but Github is only slowing if by the force of not having much left to hoover up. Gitlab et al are growing, and now AWS has its own integrated solution, but…

Post by throwanem » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:49 AM UTC

_RPM wrote: post #38

jcrawfordor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Git is decentralized. GitHub provides free hosting for Git repositories. It's not like if GitHub dies tomorrow, you would lose all your source code.

Post by throwanem » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:51 AM UTC

dustinmr wrote: post #37

Seems like we've had organizations that house ideas for the public good for centuries now. Why not involve libraries in the effort? They could keep a "master" copy and github.com, gitlab.org, SF.com, or whoever else comes next can host development versions.

Post by banachtarski » Tue, Sep 13, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

cornellwright wrote: post #21

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.