I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.
A good indicator is that the Wikipedia page even has pronounciation information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice What other major software has that?
Somewhat disappointingly, it’s just pronounced exactly the way it’s spelled: LEE-bruh-OFF-iss
I've used libresprite and generally think it's very nice, but I'd really recommend using GIMP or Krita over it for most pixel art, learning those is useful outside of pixel art
Aseprite is open source. The source is open for anyone to access right here: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite You might be confusing license with access . The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.
"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source". "source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available". [0]: https://opensource.org/osd [1]: https://en.wikipe…
The newest news post on this barebones site is from 2023, announcing the MacOS downloads. On the news page there's two other posts; the oldest one is from 2022, and talks about a complete rewrite of the code. I think this fork looks pretty dead.
The master branch had a commit 3 weeks ago. But also, if it worked in 2022 I would sure hope it works now. Not everything needs to be updated forever.
I mean if you're the kind of person who'd happily skip out on two major versions worth of bugfixes, updates, and new features in favor of the right source-code license, then sure I guess it's a better choice.
The history section of the repo clears it up [0] > LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016. > This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite. Also I am not really sure if…
Same old story, too much support requests and bad actors making it hard to make money off opensource. This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along. LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.
It's good to have open source software.
It's good to support honest and high quality proprietary software.
Aseprite offers the latter good, this offers the former good.
The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved. So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..
Most of the purpose of pixel art is that it's hand crafted and every pixel matters. Not much point to pixel art if you drop that aspect.
Sorry, the point? isn’t the point of art pretty much what a person wants it to be?
Not OP and I won't dispute your point exactly but I'd like to point to a book called Pixel Logic wherein the author makes the same point regarding pixel art. Even though you'll be using stuff like the Lasso and Paint Bucket tools the big thing about pixel art is the manual control and precision of pixel placement (by hand) where you employ techniques like anti aliasing (again by hand). Advanced techniques like sub-pixeling when doing animation frames are another thing that makes sense only when you can place pixels one by one.
I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre me…
I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...) Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...
"Windows" actually is related to what it does. As you might already know, before Windows, you just had DOS, which was 100% full screen all the time. Then Windows came along an let you run DOS programs (and Windows programs, of course) inside of their own windows, and let you have multiple windows open at once. Then, only after that was hugely successful, it became its own standalone OS. So at least at the time it was created and became popular, its name was very related to what it did.
This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.
I think Libresprite is a fork of Aseprite from before it changed its license. In that context, maybe not a big deal.