[HN Gopher] Nebulosity is now open-source and free
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       Nebulosity is now open-source and free
        
       Author : NKosmatos
       Score  : 118 points
       Date   : 2022-01-02 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.stark-labs.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.stark-labs.com)
        
       | leephillips wrote:
       | Anything like this is great news, but this program doesn't run on
       | any free operating systems.
        
         | squarefoot wrote:
         | Give it some time. Obscurity and restrictive licenses are the
         | main obstacles preventing ports to open systems, and the author
         | removed both.
        
         | solarkraft wrote:
         | There's hope this will change :-)
        
       | yccs27 wrote:
       | The name kind of sounds like a mash-up of education streaming
       | platforms Nebula + Curiosity Stream. Maybe I have just seen too
       | many sponsored video segments...
        
       | NKosmatos wrote:
       | Nebulosity is a very good cross-platform capture and processing
       | astrophotography software. From the Stark Labs webpage:
       | "Nebulosity has gone open-source[0] and free. Here is a code to
       | unlock Nebulosity if you don't download[1] the open-source build:
       | N4-14627-55834-23500-59673".
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/celstark/OpenNebulosity [1]
       | http://www.stark-labs.com/downloads.html
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | Last commit is from November 7 2020. Seems abandoned and open
       | sourced so it could endure a bit longer. Fortunately there are
       | good FLOSS multi-platform astronomy software already.
        
       | api wrote:
       | Unfortunately this is often a signal of something shutting down.
        
         | sildur wrote:
         | Yeah, like OpenOffice, or Blender, or Java, or UQM.
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | OpenOffice, Blender and Java were in "full steam" development
           | when they were open sourced. Actually, the company developing
           | Blender had some financial difficulties, but its development
           | was running nevertheless.
        
           | cinntaile wrote:
           | Can you tell us something about the percentage of projects
           | that made a successful transition? At this point it is hard
           | to tell whether your examples are survivorship bias or not.
        
         | SloopJon wrote:
         | This is not a category of software that I'm familiar with, so I
         | don't know how Nebulosity compares to its competitors, free or
         | proprietary. My intuition says that 71,000 lines of C and C++
         | code is manageable for a person or group with the right
         | motivation.
         | 
         | One thing that puts a clock on it in the intermediate to long
         | term is camera support, which I gather from the README is a
         | significant maintenance task. The project will bleed users if
         | it doesn't support their new cameras.
         | 
         | Edit: it looks like Nebulosity sold for $95. Some other
         | software in this space I see mentioned on the Cloudy Nights
         | forum are Astro Pixel Processor (EUR 165), PixInsight (EUR
         | 165), and Siril (free).
        
         | solarkraft wrote:
         | It does seem to me like the author doesn't expect to sell many
         | more licenses and perhaps wants to wind down his work on it.
         | This can definitely endanger a project (especially previously a
         | one man show, bus factor and all). But instead of a fairly
         | certain death, they have chosen to give the community a chance
         | to keep working on it, which _can_ succeed and help make
         | Nebulosity the de-facto standard in its category.
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-02 23:01 UTC)