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Libtiff goes offline

madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com

81–90 of 121 posts

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#81

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.

I'm not saying you should do it or that it's the best option, but putting your code under the umbrella of something like the FSF or the Apache foundation comes with this sort of benefits.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#82

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

Can we have multichannel 16bit PNGs now? Can PNGs hold 3D images? If so awesome I can drop TIFF at last.

Not all images are taken by cameras using 3 channels.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#83
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might lose a lot of metadata around it. The comment to which you're responding mentions issues, which along with pull requests would be a particular area of concern.

Would it be any different than say a redmine gets lost? Still, the coupling to GH is still a concern.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#85
post #38

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.

It ameliorates the problem by making sure you have your repo and history, yes; but, you do lose the means of distribution (host) which is a loss and I think is really what happened here with libtiff.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#86
post #38

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.

[deleted]

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#87
post #58

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

I don't know of any other application-independent image format with good support for layers. Seriously. (Even Tiff doesn't really have good support for layers.) .PSD is tightly tied to Photoshop's internals, and .xcf is tightly tied to Gimp's internals. (The Gimp core developers explicitly recommend against using .xcf as an interchange format, even though the format has a fairly complete publicly available spec.) I'v…

What happened with the OpenRaster format?

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#88

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

No matter how old or outdated a technology is, there will always be someone still using it somewhere.

I work for a company that makes workers' compensation software. I don't know of anything in our product that actually generates new TIFFs, but we've got plenty of old ones bumping around that were either uploaded by users or imported from other systems. I end up interacting with TIFFs one way or another every other month or so.

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#89
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why a DVCS is important, the history goes with every copy.

A history goes with every copy. You still need a protocol for determining the history.

> You still need a protocol for determining the history.

Is this a real problem or a theoretical problem?

Re: Libtiff goes offline

#90
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A potentially brilliant idea. I wish I had a clue how to follow up on it. Perhaps someone else here might!

The Internet Archive would be the perfect group of folks to archive code.

I love the Internet Archive, so it would be great if some kind of archiving function could be worked out. But if it's on GitHub now, it should be exported to Zenodo today, so there's at least one reference version around for Internet Archive to backup.
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