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Free Lossless Image Format

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Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#331

Post by belorn »

kazinator wrote: post #184
robert_foss wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also believe this, but it is not an established fact. The GPL does prohibit it, and so whether that is actually enforceable has to be tested in a court of law. So you are in fact not free to do this, if you have a boss above you who cares dearly about the company steering clear of hot water. I'd be willing to testify as a technical expert in a court of law that the GPL cannot reasonably rule out dynamic linking; th…

The problem with that line of thought is that the courts don't care if its use or integration, but if the resulting work depends on someone else work. The word used in copyright law is transform, adapt, recast, and such changes requires additional copyright permission. For example, if I buy a painting and cut it into pieces and rearrange them, I actually need an additional license beyond what I got from purchasing the copy. Components can not be cleanly viewed as separate when dealing with copyright.

You can also turn this around and ask if its legal to use process call within a other program without invoking the need for additional permissions. FSF view that it should be legal, but it has never been tested. By now however an industry standard has formed around the FSF guidelines and most courts would just look at it when deciding. This is what commonly happen when no one go to court to find out what the rules actually should be.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#332

Post by jonsneyers »

silverbacknet wrote: post #321
vidarh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That example is looking at a specific file size . So what he's saying is that he was unable to produce a JPEG 2000 image in a file that size from that image, not from an image of that resolution in general.

He didn't try hard enough. OpenJPEG has a file size parameter, which can go well below its -q 0 size. I was easily able to generate a 16.9K jp2 by specifying the size: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54412753/doom9/fish.jp2 which in png looks like: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54412753/doom9/fish.jp2.... Looks better than anything else but BPG at that size, to me, although FLIF obviously isn't optimized fo…

Thanks for pointing this out! I only tried ImageMagick convert at minimum -quality. Sorry about that.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#333

Post by belorn »

bloody_pretzels wrote: post #316
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…

You're not quite right. Everything that touches the GPL code has to become GPL, period. GPL compatibility only exists in one direction. A license is compatible if it is relicensable as GPL, the GPL itself isn't compatible with anything. Rant: I really want to like the GPL, but this requirement is downright hostile towards other open source licenses. And in my opinion it's not even necessary for the GPL's mission. Sur…

What you are describing in the rant is how GPL works, so surely there must be some misunderstanding here. If you use a GPLv3 library, your own additions to it can be GPLv3 or any compatible license. It can be mit, apache, BSD, mpl, CC-anything so long it allow commercial use, and almost any of the free and open source licenses. The entire thing to do not need to be GPL and in large projects its commonly not.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#334

Post by belorn »

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".

Guess how many court cases has been about developers tainted from reading code.

1000? 1? 0?

Zero. You are about as likely to be tainted from reading GPL code as to be tainted by reading HN, the news paper, or driving around in silicon valley and looking at building with programmers in them.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#335

Post by jonsneyers »

silverbacknet wrote: post #330
versteegen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hope the author can come back to tell us whether he did comparisons with different speed presets for BPG; it ranges from insanely fast to insanely slow, and that's probably just the default.

I only tried bpgenc with the default speed presets.

It's a bit premature to discuss compression/decompression speed, because this is just a prototype implementation and there are probably many ways to improve the speed. Premature optimization is rarely a good idea.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#336

Post by anentropic »

am I the only one who doesn't understand the horizontal axis on their graphs: "Images sorted on compression ratio"?

what does it mean that the FLIF lines suddenly get worse than PNG over on the right-hand side?

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#337

Post by tarblog »

scott_s wrote: post #296
agwa wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not because FLIF is GPL v3+ now, that we can't add more permissive licenses later. That's only guaranteed if you obtain copyright assignment from any contributors now . Otherwise, re-licensing will be a massive headache as you'll need to track down all the copyright holders for permission. Some might refuse or have have dropped off the map.

Right now, N=2. As of 9 hours ago, it was N=1. I think he's okay at the moment. https://github.com/jonsneyers/FLIF/commits/master

I don't know, at this rate, in 9 days he'll need agreement from everyone in the world!

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#338

Post by teddyh »

err4nt wrote: post #309
davidw wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSD/MIT, or ASL2 are pretty much the standard if you want to see something as widely used as possible, which this sounds like might be the case. Cool work in any case! One thing the page could use is "how much processing power does this use, compared to other things?"

I use MIT because I want the license never to be an issue to somebody taking it an using it for their own needs. Do you know of any reason why people would object to MIT, or is that the best one for a plugin/library?

The MIT licence does not contain a patent grant, so users of the plugin/library could still be sued for patent infringement. The Apache2 licence does contain a patent grant, and GPLv3 follows its lead in that regard.

Re: Free Lossless Image Format

#339

Post by binarycrusader »

belorn wrote: post #327
binarycrusader wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, hence why I referred to "copyleft".

Except that game developers are already using LGPLv3, especially on the PC market which is only worth $25 billion in size . A key attribute for companies in a heavy competitive market is that they have to use every tool available to get the best product out in least amount of development time. If a company decided to avoid a license just because of religious reasons, 10 other companies will jump into its place and ou…

There are always exceptions, we are talking about the general case. Anecdotally, in my professional experience every commercial developer I've worked with or am aware of will always avoid any copyleft-licensed material and many license agreements for third-party platforms prphibit their use.

Yes, some platform holders will use it themselves, but that is not their preference. Ultimately, image encoding and decoding is a crowded market with many alternatives and I strongly believe that a copyleft-licensed component will always be passed over in favor of alternatives unless it is overwheingly compelling and a viable option.

Some companies explicitly prphibit the use of any copyleft licensed software in their development.

Certain conditions of the GPL and LGPL are impossible to fulfill on some platforms.

With that in mind, I feel like my assertions remain reasonable.

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