FLIF may be dead on arrival due to GPL license
- Anmelden oder Registrieren um Kommentare zu schreiben
http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=15/10/02/1525244
https://github.com/jonsneyers/FLIF/issues/3
It is interesting that this person went with a GPL license for a library/codec when he/she could have gone with maybe the LGPL or MPL or maybe Apache/BSD/MIT if they want to follow the same path as Opus and Vorbis. This may be a use case where the codec will scare people away from the GPL. That's what the commenters seem to think on Slashdot.
Thoughts?
Hey, I know that guy! He's one of the people in the OpenPandora community who care about freedom rather than just "open source". Quite a loud libre software supporting voice there.
Anyway: FLIF is an alternative for widely used non-patented, non-secret formats like PNG and JPEG. So really, even if it stays entirely under the GNU GPL and isn't adopted by proprietary programs as a result, so what? They'll just continue to use PNG and JPEG, which are perfectly fine, and it will only be their loss that they can't use FLIF.
Due to him favoring ideology,
- Cannot be used in the majority of web browsers.
- Cannot be used in the majority of photo viewers.
- Cannot be used in the majority of photo editors.
- Cannot be used in phones, tablets, and cameras.
- Cannot be used in TVs and dedicated media hardware.
There's a reason why people do not use GPL for codecs and file formats. It causes everything that even thinks about it to be GPL through its intrusive tentacles and web of limitations.
> Cannot be used in the majority of web browsers.
Define "majority". All of the libre Web browsers I'm aware of are under GPL-compatible licenses. Firefox's compatibility is indirect, but all Mozilla would have to do to be able to use FLIF, assuming it stays under the GPL, is dual-license Firefox under both the MPL 2.0 and the GPL, which they can easily do thanks to the MPL's terms. (They could even just stick with the GPL, though they probably wouldn't do that.)
Of course proprietary browsers can't use it (without re-implementing it), but who cares? The only negative effect that can result from this is people continuing to use PNG rather than switching over to FLIF.
> Cannot be used in the majority of photo viewers.
Citation needed. gThumb is under the GNU GPL. And if you're talking about proprietary photo viewers, again, so what? Then we get the benefits of FLIF, and proprietary photo viewers don't.
> Cannot be used in the majority of photo editors.
So, you need to use a libre image editor, like the GIMP, to export it, giving these editors an advantage over proprietary image editors. That sounds like a good deal to me!
> Cannot be used in phones, tablets, and cameras.
That's just over-generalizing. Not all phones and tablets run iOS. Can most cameras' software even be updated in the first place?
But again, if a camera can use FLIF, great for it! That means storing the pictures in a lossless format. If they can't? Well, they'll just continue to use JPEG. And nothing of value was lost.
1.) Majority as in Internet Explorer/Edge, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. All are under closed sources licenses that would make them GPL if they included this. The only exception would be Firefox, which is under the GPL friendly MPL 2.0.
2.) I'm talking about photo viewers in Windows and Mac mainly, which is the majority of desktop users.
3.) Photoshop and Illustrator come to mind. Those are the only ones that matter to pretty much all students and professionals in design.
4.) We all know the Apple won't have GPL software on it. Android phones that you get from your carrier won't either as that would mean that the custom code that AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon add to their phones would be copyleft. Android is just a base to them and the rest is all them.
Copyleft doesn't spread to other programs that happen to be installed on the same system. Android doesn't prevent libre programs from running on it.
As for the rest, you're just saying that a bunch of proprietary programs can't use FLIF if it's under the GNU GPL. True, but you're entirely missing the point that it doesn't matter. It's their loss, not ours.
> Due to him favoring ideology,
>
> - Cannot be used in the majority of [...]
As far as I know nobody is stopping any proprietor from implementing
support for FLIF by writing their own code. To the extent FLIF provides
better technical capabilities to PNG, FLIF provides an interesting
counterexample to anyone who thinks that proprietors work in the user's
best interest, or anyone who thinks that freedom of choice is a good goal
unto itself because we'll get to see if proprietors agree.
> There's a reason why people do not use GPL for codecs and file formats.
Proprietors don't because they seek user lock-in to their services &
proprietary software.
> It causes everything that even thinks about it to be GPL through its
> intrusive tentacles and web of limitations.
Something similar could be said for when a proprietor distributes something
under a nonfree license: one either negotiates on their terms or
distributes software under a pushover license that allows the proprietor to
make derivatives without passing on the software freedom granted in the
reference implementation. I say "similar" not "the same" because the
glaring difference is the copylefted software freedom.
It's a shame that proprietors and those who carry water for them think it's
everyone else's responsibility to provide gratis labor to help them keep
users from their software freedom.
That's a good thing the FLIF team was able to comprise. Codecs and formats in general should be as unrestricted as possible to aid in adoption. Heck, the Edge browser in Windows 10 is getting WebM support thanks to the codecs being under a BSD license.
There's no compromise involved. They specify that any "permissive" license they move to later must be GPL-compatible. Relicensing was probably their intention right from the start, but the anti-copyleft trolls on Slashdot don't usually let nuanced details like that stop them from howling for blood.
It's their choice of course, but I would recommend they stay with GPL but use GPLv3. This would give proprietary vendors a legal guarantee that they are safe from patent trolling if they support FLIF. To do that, they would either need to write to own code from scratch, or comply with the copyleft. Why should proprietary vendors benefit from code written by the free software movement when they're not willing to let us benefit from their code?
- Anmelden oder Registrieren um Kommentare zu schreiben