[HN Gopher] libjpeg-turbo 3.0 has been released, and why there m...
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libjpeg-turbo 3.0 has been released, and why there may never be a
3.1
Author : rettichschnidi
Score : 167 points
Date : 2023-07-03 22:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| turnsout wrote:
| Sad to see this--libjpeg-turbo is great! I once built it into an
| iOS project to allow reading & writing of giant JPEGs when the
| first party API used too much RAM.
| [deleted]
| hannob wrote:
| For a library like libjpeg-turbo, it's probably best that it
| stays in maintenance mode.
|
| I mean... it's JPG. It's the traditional lossy image format that
| everyone's been using since forever, and that hasn't received any
| changes. It also shouldn't receive any changes, as its big
| advantage is its compatibility. If you want something better,
| you'd use other formats like avif.
|
| I'm all for paying open source maintainers, and this guy should
| receive money so he can continue to fix bugs and do other minor
| maintenance work. But I don't see why there should be new
| features in the default jpg library.
| regularfry wrote:
| This isn't the default jpeg library. That's libjpeg. In this
| case, the `jpeg` bit isn't as interesting as the `-turbo` bit.
| Keeping up with the fastest way to implement JPEG on new
| architectures and CPUs is worthwhile.
| st_goliath wrote:
| Depends on what exactly the two of you mean by "default
| library". It's a fork of libjpeg alright, but from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libjpeg#History we _do_ get
| this:
|
| > In 2019, libjpeg-turbo became the ISO and ITU endorsed
| reference implementation for the JPEG format. [13]
|
| The paragraph that follows might help to clarify why this
| happened.
| regularfry wrote:
| That's entirely fair, but also worth pointing out that
| (according to the google groups post) libjpeg-turbo doesn't
| implement all of the standard. To be even more fair, I
| don't know if libjpeg does either.
| Hello71 wrote:
| the email lists many reasons to continue libjpeg-turbo
| development which are still relevant if a new (let's say better
| for the sake of argument) image standard exists:
|
| > expanding SIMD coverage to new algorithms or instruction sets
| or CPU architectures, supporting less popular new platforms,
| improving the APIs, hardening security, improving fuzzer
| coverage, enhancing the build system, improving automation, etc
| isaacfrond wrote:
| I'm sorry but I have no sympathy. I turn down real jobs to work
| on my hobby. Why won't anybody pay me??
|
| What does he expect to happen? I really don't get it. If you like
| to work on opensource. Sure, do your thing. But if the benefit in
| CV building and personal satisfaction are not enough, why don't
| you stop doing it?
| jakkos wrote:
| This is such a bad take.
|
| Their "hobby" saves huge corporations large amounts of money. I
| don't understand how it's not obvious that they should chip in
| comparatively small amounts of money to make sure that the
| project stays updated and secure.
|
| Why bother funding open source at all, it's not like it's the
| foundation of the entire worlds infrastructure or anything.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Haha. That's the point. Everything would still work if no
| open source existed. Tech would just be far more centralized
| in the hands of a few companies who have all the software
| libraries. Progress and development of tech would be far
| slower. But the world would keep turning just fine. Open
| source exists only because of the programmers' love for
| programming, desire of attention and the desire to benefit
| other people's lives. Open source software mostly starts out
| as a surrogate activity. No company needs to fund individual
| open source devs. They'll go with whatever at hand, it
| doesn't matter, sometimes even hiring someone to continue the
| open source project the original dev abandoned cause lack of
| funding.
| whizzter wrote:
| Your real job is made easier by low paid people like him, if
| not you'd be forced to spend time to (badly) re-implementing
| the JPEG standard.
|
| Just because "it helps the CV" doesn't mean that's an end goal
| in itself in the long run, and once a library is popular the
| implications (security issues!) of non-maintenance is far
| higher even if it started out as a "fun" project.
|
| This xkcd illustrates it perfectly, https://xkcd.com/2347/
| rob74 wrote:
| Just wanted to post the same xkcd, then I thought someone
| already might have, and my suspicion was correct. I guess
| most here have already seen it at one time or other, but
| maybe some haven't yet...
| aspyct wrote:
| Whether you know it or not, you have used libjpeg-turbo. In
| fact you are probably using it every day, it's just behind the
| scenes, just like openssl is.
|
| These projects deserve funding, if at least from giants like
| facebook & co.
| defrost wrote:
| > These projects deserve funding, if at least from giants
| like facebook & co.
|
| Absolutely.
|
| Looking at:
|
| https://github.com/libjpeg-turbo/libjpeg-
| turbo/releases/tag/...
|
| one wonders what possible harm could come from leaving image
| decompression buffer faults from maliciously crafted jpegs in
| popular browsers and software unattended.
| winter_blue wrote:
| > one wonders what possible harm could come from leaving
| image decompression buffer faults from maliciously crafted
| jpegs in popular browsers and software unattended
|
| This is yet another reason a switch to a memory-safe
| language like _unsafe_ -free Rust is highly imperative.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| While I think the move to safer code through Rust and
| other alternatives is a nice breath of fresh air, I doubt
| you can get these kinds of optimization without using
| unsafe code in Rust. These optimized implementations
| often require some kind of safety-bypassing memory
| modifications to work as efficiently ad they do.
|
| There's a reason https://github.com/libjpeg-
| turbo/libjpeg-turbo/tree/main/sim... is filled with
| assembly files with conditional loading.
| winter_blue wrote:
| Oh wow, I didn't realize there were mountains of Assembly
| in there. If this is the case, I'd say: let's put
| libraries like this Docker-like containers (in their
| processes _with their own address space_ ), and use
| mmap/etc-based highly-efficient IPC to interact with
| them.
|
| With all the hyper-optimized assembly in there, it's
| probably still more efficient even with the container
| penalty (which, tbh, is close to zero on Linux these
| days).
| bombolo wrote:
| I'm sure in a couple of years a new category of security
| bugs that can happily happen in rust will pop up.
| mcherm wrote:
| ...at which point the code written in C will suffer from
| BOTH categories of bug, while code written in any
| language whose compiler guarantees memory safety will
| not.
|
| Guaranteeing memory safety isn't just an overhyped
| benefit meaningful only to Rust fanboys. It is also one
| important reason why much code is written in Java,
| Python, or JavaScript. It is a valuable property for any
| language to have.
| bombolo wrote:
| Rust doesn't guarantee memory safety in general... it is
| better at it than C for sure, but not impossible to have
| bugs there too.
|
| The 100% certainty you use to claim it's absolutely
| memory safe is the essence of the problem with the rust
| fanboys.
| tialaramex wrote:
| For this work we don't need a general purpose language
| like Rust.
|
| WUFFS is a special purpose language for Wrangling
| Untrusted File Formats Safely:
|
| WUFFS pays a high price (loss of generality) for a
| valuable reward (compile time assurance of memory safety,
| very high performance) and it makes no sense for people
| to hand roll this sort of software in C when they should
| use WUFFS.
|
| https://github.com/google/wuffs
| winter_blue wrote:
| Wow, WUFFS is amazing. I wonder if a hypothetical
| new/future general-purposes language could have a non-
| Turing-complete subset within it with WUFFS-like
| guarantees.
| sshine wrote:
| > What does he expect to happen?
|
| To get paid for doing open source.
|
| This is a plea for increased funding.
|
| You can think of it as a job application being broadcast.
|
| His software is clearly valued, but companies take 3rd-party
| dependencies for granted because they're just there and can be
| used for free. There are things a company can do to replenish
| the ecosystem: Give time or money to maintain projects they
| depend on.
|
| > if the benefit in CV building and personal satisfaction are
| not enough, why don't you stop doing it?
|
| I'm afraid you don't understand the basic premise:
|
| He is not (primarily) doing open source to promote his CV.
|
| He is (presumably) doing open source for ideology and
| lifestyle: because it provides a good work environment where
| you work on exactly what you want, provides value that scales
| beyond what a single company can create (but is otherwise
| somewhat harder to measure), and provides value to the global,
| general public, which is not something people with day jobs can
| claim as easily.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| My brother in law is an artist. He paints beautiful pictures
| and writes a comic book. His lifestyle choice appears to be
| fulfilling for him. He also doesn't own a car or a house.
| Choices have consequences. Different than OP, he doesn't
| complain about it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| So your complaint is effectively .. that you have to hear
| about this?
| thomasz wrote:
| I don't think that there are companies out there making
| billions while relying on your brother in laws work without
| paying him a dime.
| sshine wrote:
| I have artist friends, some receive private and state
| grants, others only survive on teaching and selling art.
| They do sometimes complain about how hard life is without
| money, but it's a choice.
|
| If an artist said "I'm going to quit art if the world
| doesn't pay me", surely most people would just say, "good
| luck with that."
|
| If someone's art piece contained a bug that broke a
| company's industrial build pipeline, and all funding for
| improving the art piece was gone the next 15 months, I'm
| sure that company would consider donating.
|
| There isn't a principal difference between art and software
| here. It is the nature of companies that rely on open
| source that is not well understood here, causing criticism
| and questions.
|
| This is a friendly reminder that anyone interested in a 3.1
| release in the foreseeable future should cough up. :-)
|
| I really don't see the complaining.
| eviks wrote:
| why do you complain about someone else complaining?
| bavell wrote:
| Why do you complain about someone else complaining over
| someone else's complaints?
| sshine wrote:
| They're not complaining, they're asking a question.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Is your brother's art present on billions of machines?
|
| Out of curiosity. You know, apples and oranges.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Is your brother's art present on billions of machines?
|
| That alone does not entitle anyone to payment. All you're
| entitled to - as per license - is to have the license
| reproduced in full on some "About > Licenses" page.
|
| Anything else is underpants-gnome level of magical
| thinking:
|
| 1. Author FL/OSS package
|
| 2. Package get wildly popular
|
| 3. ???
|
| 4. Profits
| turmeric_root wrote:
| i think it'd be cool if you could make art and still own a
| house
| [deleted]
| stefs wrote:
| "open source" doesn't automatically mean it's a hobby project
| done in the free time for no compensation. sure, most projects
| are developed in this fashion but the concepts are only
| incidentially correlated.
|
| working on open source software is and can be a "real" job. the
| only difference to closed source software is that the source
| code is open - nothing else (simplified).
|
| if you want your hair cut, pay the hairdresser. if you're
| interested in the continued development of the project, pay the
| author. it's as simple as that.
|
| in this case there's not enough funding so the project is
| discontinued. doesn't get more professional and non-hobbyist
| than that.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| This would work if the OSI wouldn't vehemently oppose
| usecase-based restrictions for open source. I think more
| people should say "it's forbidden to use it for <list things
| like LLMs, social media, etc.>, if you want to use it, buy a
| licence from me"
|
| Right now, those corporations just steal the code and sponsor
| the OSI's gatekeeping.
| mrighele wrote:
| > working on open source software is and can be a "real" job.
| the only difference to closed source software is that the
| source code is open - nothing else (simplified).
|
| That is no small difference. In particular the business is
| completely different and if you want to make a living out of
| it, you should plan your job accordingly: find an employer
| that pays you to write the software, make a business around
| support for the software, open a twitch/YouTube channel and
| monetize it, etc., but asking people (or worse corporations)
| that have the right to use something for free to pay for it
| doesn't look to me like the best course of action.
|
| > if you want your hair cut, pay the hairdresser. if you're
| interested in the continued development of the project, pay
| the author. it's as simple as that.
|
| If you offer to cut the hair for free, you shouldn't complain
| that rich people don't pay for your services, and the "but
| everybody comes to me" is not a good enough reason,
| especially when being free is one of the motivations.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > you shouldn't complain that rich people don't pay for
| your services
|
| You also should not complain when the hairdresser stops
| offering free haircuts.
| mrighele wrote:
| Ah yes, but I am not complaining about that, and I can
| understand that the author doesn't want to work anymore
| on the project.
|
| What I am complaining about is the assumption that people
| using open source software have to contribute to the
| authors, expecially if they have plenty of money. Open
| source is not about that. If that is the expectation, a
| different type of license is probably better suited.
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| To put it in perspective, "we" on HN are like
| hairdressers who all chose to charge for our services.
|
| So it's less of a complaint and more of well meaning
| advise that he too should work for pay.
| boudin wrote:
| So, because it's open source, he can't ask for a salary and do
| some marketing to get funding? What entitles you to decide that
| this guy doesn't have the right to try to monetise his project?
| cyco130 wrote:
| > why don't you stop doing it?
|
| Err, this is him announcing that he's stopping doing it.
| Osiris wrote:
| The author chose a license. Why not dual license it for
| commercial use?
| mkl wrote:
| The author chose a BSD-style license that has no problem with
| use in proprietary software. It's too late to do something like
| a dual AGPL and commercial license (unless some amazing new
| features are added), as it's already in widespread commercial
| use.
| planede wrote:
| The author could release new versions with a more restrictive
| license.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The license is probably a reason for its popularity.
| planede wrote:
| Possibly. Switching to GPL would probably mean that
| chromium can no longer use it (I think they use it
| currently, but I'm not 100% sure). Then they could switch
| to an other permissively licensed jpeg library that is
| maintained (is there any?), roll their own (probably
| forking an old version), or persuade the author to
| consider licensing new versions permissively (hopefully
| with some money).
| Macha wrote:
| There is of course the original libjpeg, which libjpeg-
| turbo forked from back in the 00s, which has had its
| latest release in 2022.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I wonder if author has paid a red cent to the maintainers
| of libjpeg
| mkl wrote:
| But the existing version under the permissive license
| already exists, and everyone can keep using it or even fork
| it. The only way a change to a more restrictive license
| could work is if there were really compelling features only
| available in that version.
| planede wrote:
| Well, the author mostly complains about lack of funding
| for maintaining the library, making bug fixes and adding
| new features. So I think that's OK?
| pierat wrote:
| In the end, it's not the individuals who are greedy to
| the extreme. Instead, it's the companies that are
| pathologically greedy to the point of killing off what
| they need to survive.
|
| These companies could throw $10k or more at their FLOSS
| constituents to thank them. And more most of the
| companies we're talking here, is a rounding error of a
| rounding error. But, most don't cause there is no 'need'
| to.
|
| Why build a community when you can just use people up?
| worrycue wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| An accountant once told me that you don't get paid unless
| you send out invoices.
|
| Businesses aren't going to pay unless they are mandated
| to, because why would they otherwise?
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Even that won't be guaranteed to work. Bash is forever
| stuck on an ancient version on macOS, because Apple
| doesn't want to touch GPLv3 code. At some point they
| switched to zsh for the default shell.
| planede wrote:
| Works for whom? I don't think the authors of bash care.
| bombolo wrote:
| That's entirely apple's fault.
| regularfry wrote:
| The really compelling feature will come along, and it'll
| be to take advantage of the acceleration capability of a
| new instruction set or CPU that doesn't exist yet. He
| could quite happily say "4.0 will be GPL or email-for-
| commercial-terms" safe in the knowledge that such an
| update will be needed. Unfortunately it sounds like it's
| about 5 years too late for him.
| dzogchen wrote:
| In this case many FOSS projects that depend on it will just not
| update because of license incompatibility.
| pmontra wrote:
| LGPL is compatible even closed source. From
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html (and be sure
| to check the title of the page)
|
| "using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in
| proprietary programs"
|
| so it's going to be OK even in BSD and other permissive
| licenses.
| jart wrote:
| Software development is the process of pure creation. It
| shouldn't be debased with the language of resource scarcity. A
| weekend spent hacking on simd assembly optimizations is not a
| loss of labor resources. Why write code if not for the pleasure
| of it? No open source developer should ever apologize to his fans
| for delaying a release because some Apparatchik at Microsoft
| refused to sign his binary. Open source is not the service
| industry for schemers and penny-pinching money men. If you're too
| nice to those people then you'll just end up as cynical and burnt
| out as them. DRC should consider backpacking or possibly
| couchsurfing, then come back to libjpeg-turbo after a year with a
| clear mind.
| mariusmg wrote:
| >Why write code if not for the pleasure of it?
|
| Ask a pornstar the same question...but not about code.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm torn on this. On one hand I do agree and lament that many
| foundational open source products are underfunded to the
| detriment of its users.
|
| But like I say when a for-profit corporation complains and blames
| outside forces when they have trouble with their finances: it is
| not our responsibility to make your business model work.
|
| If you want to get paid a certain amount to write software,
| donations are often not a reliable way to do that. As much as I
| am an open-source advocate, dual licensing and requiring payments
| for commercial use seems like a better path to stable income,
| assuming others believe your software is worth the price.
| armitron wrote:
| A lot of open source authors know that of course, but still,
| they choose the begging-for-donations / appeals-to-corporate-
| funding route once their project becomes popular.
|
| Dual licensing and requiring payments for commercial use comes
| with risk as companies could flock to alternatives or forks,
| but at the end of the day, is the better model as it
| establishes expectations upfront and makes it clear that one
| fully stands behind one's product.
| pastage wrote:
| This is part of something we pay 300k per year for, should they
| sponsor the projects they include in their product?
| mceachen wrote:
| Solution: ask your company to sponsor the project. It's easy:
|
| https://github.com/sponsors/libjpeg-turbo
|
| Ideally, every developer in every large co would be given some
| budget to spread sponsorship money around as they saw fit--ask
| your manager to make it happen. Note that they may be able to
| register this as a marketing expense, which may be more favorable
| to your accounting department.
|
| (I use this library in PhotoStructure via Sharp and libvips, so I
| just started sponsoring it)
| omoikane wrote:
| Near the end of the linked post: How can you
| help? If every individual developer who used libjpeg-turbo on a
| regular basis donated just $5-10/month to the project through
| GitHub Sponsors (https://github.com/sponsors/libjpeg-turbo),
| we'd have a healthy amount of general funding.
| sersi wrote:
| I've tried that in the past and had a hard time doing so. I
| managed to get the company to sponsor projects like sidekiq
| because there were some benefits in doing so (even if we
| actually never used the enterprise benefits) but I haven't been
| able to convince them to donate any money. They'd just tell me
| that they don't see any benefits in doing so.
|
| I end up donating with my own money to opensource projects I
| value but I don't have enough money to properly fund all
| projects I would like.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > Ideally, every developer in every large co would be given
| some budget to spread sponsorship money around as they saw fit
|
| If I'm not mistaken, there is a _ton_ of overhead ensuring that
| the money doesn 't directly benefit any of the employees
| themselves. There are all sorts of regulations around how
| things like gifts and donations are accounted for, taxed and so
| forth. Then, you also wade into territory of graft, bribes and
| so on (employees of company A funneling money into open source
| project B, which is worked on by employees of potential
| customer C).
| DannyBee wrote:
| I guess I'll be contrarian.
|
| Being a commercial product is hard. Having customers, supporting
| them, etc is very hard. Most can't sustain themselves either.
| Especially when competing with open source.
|
| Every time I read about "criminal underfunding" of open source,
| it comes off as people wanting to be able to capture some of the
| value of being commercial without _any_ of the cost. Being open
| source means more people use your software. But they owe you
| nothing at all for that. Enough value to pay themselves to work
| on it is not a small amount of value, and most commercial
| software doesn 't make it there either.
|
| If you want people to pay then be paid software. Otherwise you
| often just want a contract with terms nobody wants to pay you
| for. There is nothing abnormal about that, and it's certainly not
| "criminal underfunding".
|
| I'm sorry it's not as easy as people want it to be, but it never
| was - this isn't new, and it not likely to be anytime soon.
|
| The main difference now seems to be how many more people feel
| their users should have greater responsibility than they require
| of them. That's one of the things that often makes your product
| popular though.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This comment is really lacking some nuance:
|
| - of course, building a successful commercial software
| (company) is a lot of work
|
| - but if you manage to create a commercial software that reach
| even _a fraction_ of libjpeg-turbo 's success, you'd get very
| rich, with lots and lots of zeros on your bank account, and a
| family free from material problems for decades to come.
|
| - nobody, including the author, claim that he should be rich.
| We just think that it's a pity that he's not able to make
| decent money, despite creating tremendous value to very
| profitable companies (and making an much easier job to
| thousands of developers far less skilled than he is, while
| still making multiple times his paycheck).
| fluoridation wrote:
| >but if you manage to create a commercial software that reach
| even a fraction of libjpeg-turbo's success, you'd get very
| rich, with lots and lots of zeros on your bank account, and a
| family free from material problems for decades to come.
|
| This is a non sequitur, given that libjpeg-turbo has reached
| libjpeg-turbo's success and its author is not several times
| very rich. It is unfortunately very possible to create a
| product that's very popular and that takes a lot of effort to
| work on, but which most people are not willing to spend any
| money on.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > This is a non sequitur, given that libjpeg-turbo has
| reached libjpeg-turbo's success and its author is not
| several times very rich.
|
| I'm afraid you must suffer from some reading impairment, as
| I explicitly said this (now with the emphasis added):
|
| > if you manage to create a _commercial software_ that
| reach even a fraction of libjpeg-turbo 's success.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This is a good discussion.
|
| In my own case, I write _every_ one of my projects as if it
| were supported, released, commercial software. I wrote
| shipping, commercial software for my entire career, and got in
| the habit. It isn't that much fun. _Lots_ of boring bits, in
| writing high-Quality, release-grade, software.
|
| That said, thank Cthulhu that I don't depend on it for a
| living.
|
| I'm pretty much my only customer. I write software that _I_
| want, and use it in almost everything I write. I also archive
| projects and apps that I am no longer actively supporting.
|
| I don't really care whether or not anyone else uses it. In
| fact, the fewer, the better.
| altairprime wrote:
| This is the whole point of modern open source: to be able to
| exploit others for their works, without them having any
| recourse for compensation or entanglement when you make lots of
| money derived from their labor. It's a technologist's
| libertarian dream come true. It's also a primary cause of
| burnout in open source developers -- but that doesn't matter,
| because there will always be more open source developers to
| exploit, so long as they believe in open source strongly
| enough.
| whateveracct wrote:
| I think the idea of an open source developer as a career and
| lifestyle is the issue here.
| altairprime wrote:
| I think the idea that creators should not get paid is the
| issue here. It's much more generic than open source.
| Another example of the same issue is how creators receive
| nothing for exploitation of their works by VC-funded AI
| companies. In both cases, the same imbalance between
| creators (who get nothing) and exploiters (who get billions
| of dollars of revenue) exists.
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think that's the issue at hand here. If you give
| away your work for free, then you shouldn't expect others
| to pay for it. Depending on the charity of others isn't a
| great business model.
|
| Projects and organizations that do get a large portion of
| their funding from donations usually need to spend a lot
| of time marketing and evangelizing to get those
| donations. A solo open source developer probably doesn't
| have the time to do that, plus write the software itself.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Also these creators chose to release their work under an
| open source license. On them completely.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Whether someone _should_ get paid is based on how much
| value their work has, not the price. Open source sets the
| price.
|
| It can be "on them" and also bad that it works this way.
| fluoridation wrote:
| No, that's nonsense. The point of a price is to set
| expectations with regards to the obligations of both
| parties to avoid arguments after a transaction is
| complete. You say "give me $X and I'll give you this
| thing" and I can accept it, negotiate, or reject it. We
| both understand that this is a commercial transaction,
| that I'm supposed to give you money when you give me the
| thing, and that if I run into problems that you're
| supposed to give me support.
|
| If you just give me something without setting a price
| then it's not a commercial transaction and I don't have
| an obligation to pay nor do you have an obligation to
| support the good or service you sold to me. Or do you
| believe that every time someone gave you a present
| actually you were supposed to pay the gift-giver based on
| the value of the present?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not an obligation on any person in particular, but
| someone that gives lots of genuinely useful gifts
| _should_ get gifts back. Is that a controversial take?
|
| Though when you mention support, that's one route to
| improving the situation. It seems like most companies are
| unwilling to buy pure support, even though most of what
| they actually want is support. If paying for pure support
| was more normalized it would be very helpful to open
| source.
| fluoridation wrote:
| You're not talking about gifts, you're talking about a
| gift economy. If we lived in a pre-monetary society, we
| could use loose accounting to keep track of debts. I get
| fish from the fisherman, and in exchange I help fix his
| boat when needed. The village doctor heals everyone, and
| in exchange he gets stuff he needs from everyone. Someone
| can slack for a bit, but they do it for too long they'll
| accrue too high a debt and people will no longer give
| them things.
|
| Well, we don't live in a pre-monetary society and we
| don't use loose accounting, except with people we're
| close with and who we can trust.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm saying they deserve value back even outside of a gift
| economy.
|
| In a monetary economy, contracts don't fit every
| situation, and someone deciding they don't want to _make_
| people pay for valuable code shouldn 't ruin their
| ability to use that code as a "day job". We need to
| figure out better methods to reward useful work, as a
| society.
| whateveracct wrote:
| They could just not do it. Spend your time more wisely.
| If you git commit, you've lost your leverage. Don't go
| write a labor politics blog post about how you're
| enslaved for writing C for free.
| altairprime wrote:
| Open source _is_ labor politics. Copyleft is shorthand
| for "I labor to create this work for the commons, and all
| who modify my work must adhere to my labor politics by
| sharing their modifications with the commons." It's
| designed specifically to counteract commercial
| exploitation of labor while denying the commons their
| modified works. Without labor politics, there would be no
| GPL, no AGPL, no Sharealike.
|
| (Ironically, my single sentence license above would be
| more likely to win a court challenge than the GPL/AGPL,
| while also being more resilient to new methodologies and
| less vulnerable to loopholes; however, it's incompatible
| with the "legal contracts should not depend on human
| judgment calls" viewpoint that's popular in technical
| circles.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| As a big Free/Libre software guy... yeah, I agree. Wish it
| wasn't that way but that is just how it can be.
| ThenAsNow wrote:
| > If you want people to pay then be paid software.
|
| It seems like source available type licenses ( _e.g._ , Kyle
| Mitchell's Big Time license: https://bigtimelicense.com/ ) are
| a reasonable middle ground for being paid software without
| giving up many of the benefits of open source.
|
| I'm hoping there's a notable uptick in adoption of licenses
| like these.
| josephcsible wrote:
| They're not reasonable at all. They deceive users and leach
| off of the good name of open source while preventing any
| actual open source projects from incorporating any of their
| code. I'm hoping there's a notable drop in adoption of
| licenses like them.
| Schnitz wrote:
| They are very reasonable and they solve a real problem. A
| big corp won't use a library from a tiny 1-5 person shop if
| when they get acquired or go under the library dies and all
| they ever got was binaries. A source available license
| solves this because the big corp knows they can maintain
| the library themselves in that case.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Doesn't real Open Source solve that problem just as well?
| Someone wrote:
| >> It seems like source available type licenses (e.g., Kyle
| Mitchell's Big Time license: https://bigtimelicense.com/ )
| are a reasonable middle ground for being paid software
| without giving up many of the benefits of open source
|
| > They're not reasonable at all. They deceive users and
| leach off of the good name of open source
|
| I disagree. Source available licenses are reasonable, but
| not "a middle ground for being paid software without giving
| up many of the benefits of open source".
|
| Reading the https://bigtimelicense.com/ and
| https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.1, though, I don't
| think that's a source available license. It doesn't mention
| source code at all.
|
| It's a license that allows small entities to use a binary
| for free, and promises larger companies to give "fair,
| reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms" (I guess that's in
| the license to 'guarantee' smaller companies they will be
| able to get such a license and that they will be able to
| afford it. IANAL, but I think the "nondiscriminatory"
| guarantees the former, but "fair and reasonable" doesn't
| fully guarantee the latter)
|
| "Source available" is more or less the reverse: it
| guarantees you can view the source, but doesn't necessarily
| give you the right to modify or even compile it
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software)
| ThenAsNow wrote:
| We probably need better, consistent terminology for
| different types of "not all the freedoms of open source
| but not proprietary secret source either", the way "open
| source" means something very specific.
|
| The Wikipedia page you cited opens with "Source-available
| software is software released through a source code
| distribution model that includes arrangements where the
| source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but
| without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called
| open-source."
|
| So by this definition, "source available" is a superset
| of FOSS, but not specific enough to imply what the user
| can and can't do with the source code. It makes sense to
| name classes of license within the "source available"
| umbrella that spell out what freedoms are
| restricted/preserved.
|
| The Big Time license is not specific as to whether the
| covered software is provided in source or binary form,
| and is easily applied to source code distributions.
| Probably the reason I associated this license with
| "source available" is the primary license author is a
| prominent U.S. lawyer involved with open source and I'm
| pretty confident it is written to be applicable to source
| code even if it is not explicit about it. Similarly, the
| BSD license doesn't require that the license be attached
| to source code - one could release binary-only software
| under the BSD license.
| ThenAsNow wrote:
| > They deceive users and leach off of the good name of open
| source
|
| How do they do that if they don't call themselves open
| source (or "Open Source (TM)" if you prefer) in the first
| place?
|
| Regardless, something needs to be done about the
| sustainability gap in open source other than writing
| messages like what's linked. The inability of your project
| to incorporate someone else's code shouldn't consign the
| rest of us to not have the benefits of access to that
| someone else's code outside of a proprietary binary.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > How do they do that if they don't call themselves open
| source (or "Open Source (TM)" if you prefer) in the first
| place?
|
| First of all, some of them DO call themselves that even
| though they unambiguously aren't. And even for the ones
| that don't, they usually try to sound as similar as
| possible to it and downplay the differences.
|
| > Regardless, something needs to be done about the
| sustainability gap in open source other than writing
| messages like what's linked.
|
| That feels like the politician's fallacy. We need to do
| something, and switching to fauxpen source is something,
| but that doesn't mean we need to switch to fauxpen
| source.
|
| > The inability of your project to incorporate someone
| else's code shouldn't consign the rest of us to not have
| the benefits of access to that someone else's code
| outside of a proprietary binary.
|
| It's not just one project that can't. If a given bit of
| code isn't open source, then _NO_ open source projects
| can incorporate it.
| ThenAsNow wrote:
| > First of all, some of them DO call themselves that even
| though they unambiguously aren't. And even for the ones
| that don't, they usually try to sound as similar as
| possible to it and downplay the differences.
|
| There was understandably uproar about things like the
| "Commons Clause" and similar attempts to retrofit
| obligations to pay onto open source licenses. I have no
| disagreement with rejecting these as misrepresentations
| of open source. But if no such misrepresentation takes
| place, this line of objection is bogus. I gave an example
| of one license that does not misrepresent itself in such
| a way. I'm sure there are others and if not, attempts
| should perhaps be made to develop others, just as we have
| multiple open source licenses available.
|
| >> Regardless, something needs to be done about the
| sustainability gap in open source other than writing
| messages like what's linked.
|
| > That feels like the politician's fallacy. We need to do
| something, and switching to fauxpen source is something,
| but that doesn't mean we need to switch to fauxpen
| source.
|
| I regret my phrasing, "something needs to be done," which
| does indeed sound like a politician. So let me rephrase.
| There is an axis, with proprietary secret source code and
| FOSS anchoring the ends. This axis is a good proxy for
| monetizability, but the axis itself is about freedom.
| With secret source, no user gets any benefit from the
| source. Source available, is, to me, a genuinely
| constructive attempt to address the need for developers
| to be compensated, while still giving users many of the
| benefits of access to the source.
|
| I don't think source available is going to be something
| we "switch to" so much as, if some developers need income
| from the code they put out there, this is a far more
| user-centric option than telling everyone to download
| binaries for platforms they may or may not use and submit
| themselves to intrusive license checks. If you want to
| get a job at a RedHat or Collabora or try to have your
| employer cover your open source time instead, more power
| to you, source available certainly doesn't stand in the
| way of that.
|
| > It's not just one project that can't. If a given bit of
| code isn't open source, then NO open source projects can
| incorporate it.
|
| Open source projects have no hope of incorporating secret
| source software either. At least with source available,
| users can look at the code, make changes, build it
| themselves, and if they fit whatever "gratis" criteria
| are a part of the license, they don't have to pay either.
| stuaxo wrote:
| This is the sort of thing Google could just chuck a chunk of
| money at, it would be less than a rounding error to them.
| jsnell wrote:
| Google is one of the three companies explicitly listed in the
| message as sponsoring the general fund of this library. What
| did it get them? Just people like you complaining that they
| aren't donating more.
|
| Why not at least complain about the large tech companies that
| aren't sponsoring at all, or only sponsoring specific project
| work?
|
| [0] From https://libjpeg-turbo.org/About/Sponsors it looks like
| a bunch of companies have sponsored specific projects, but from
| the message it sounds like these projects have been basically
| underbid by the library maintainer, and that's been part of the
| problem.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Not to leap at defending Google or any other disproportionate
| OSS consumer, but the moment you apply this logic
| _consistently_ , those costs add up to > revenue in most
| scenarios I could imagine. There is a way to make it
| sustainable, but it's not likely to be a voluntary action by
| any individual actor.
| mnau wrote:
| Open source developers are not being paid. They published under
| licenses that allow zero cost and businesses won't pay.
|
| If you want to write open source code for living, you have to
| find a business model that works. In this case, it is even under
| permissive license.
|
| * code freeze - code is under open source license only a certain
| time after commit/release. Maybe add "support", aka you get
| security fixes in timely manner.
|
| * open core - put some features behind commericial door.
|
| * go ImageSharp way of split license. That one is fun, because MS
| deprecated/killed (throws exceptions on attempt to use) official
| image/font library and that was was intended replacement. Rather
| blatant offloading of costs.
|
| This has been rehashed several time (core-js recently
| https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...).
|
| The gist of it is: Companies are not going to pay if they don't
| have to. That is the reality and it's not going to change. Plan
| accordingly.
| orf wrote:
| It's not just companies though, it's people. Lower costs win,
| factoring in quality which is just another way of saying "how
| many replacements of this cheap thing do I need before it's
| with buying this expensive thing".
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Or get a job and do open source software in your free time/not
| at all.
| antiloper wrote:
| This entire comment thread is missing the point.
|
| By releasing this library at no charge, the author is valuing his
| software at zero dollars. Downstream users accept his offer.
|
| There is no story here.
| jancsika wrote:
| > There is no story here.
|
| If funding suddenly materializes for this developer as a result
| of this email, will you search for a bug in your worldview?
| jgeada wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons.
|
| There is no stigma to being a parasite so that's what people
| do, with justifications as above. Just because it isn't legally
| required doesn't mean it is ethical to not do it.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Dung[1] beetles are not parasites - they simply take what is
| given freely, and without cost or injury to the producer. If
| an animal attempted to get beetles to pay for dung, it may
| run into competitive challenges.
|
| 1. Not a commentary on the quality if F/OSS, which I love.
| antiloper wrote:
| It's not being a parasite if the author _willingly chooses_
| to give his work away for free. It is also not the tragedy of
| the commons, since the tragedy of the commons refers to
| consuming a finite resource. A software library is not a
| finite resource since it can be copied indefinitely.
|
| This is the author choosing to work for free (which is fine),
| wanting to get paid (which is fine, and I do suggest he does
| charge for his software), and this thread making up an
| alleged ethical obligation to pay for something which has a
| price tag of zero.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Exactly, my point.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Open source is EXTREMELY HARMFUL to the non-
| owning/entrepreneuring class: Big business can built their
| billion dollar companies on open source, while the developers
| lose out: Without open source, companies would have to hire more
| devs to implement solutions, or they would have to pay external
| devs money for their solutions. This would also foster
| competition between different solution offerings.
|
| It's very unfortunate that software engineers, especially the
| good ones able to create libraries used by pretty much everyone,
| seem to lack the drive to monetize their work and instead accept
| payment through GitHub stars, likes and prayers.
| djrobstep wrote:
| Strongly agree with your first part, but with the second part,
| it's not always a lack of drive. I have a ~3k stars github
| project, and tried fairly hard to monetize it (even took VC
| money at one point), but without any success.
|
| I realized that monetizing is mostly about selling, which I'm
| simply not good at (probably because I hate it). Telling open
| source developers to simply get more hustle isn't really a
| solution.
|
| A big open source project isn't even good for your career. In
| my experience, recruiters don't care at all.
| davty wrote:
| I feel like the type of license does matter, consider the case
| if most open source as AGPL instead of MIT for example?
| q87b wrote:
| Is this sarcasm?
| tecleandor wrote:
| It's weird. Without Open Source, I don't know how small
| companies could compete against, I don't know... Oracle, for
| example.
| WJW wrote:
| What a peculiar comment on this article in particular. The
| author mentions right in the article that they run several open
| source project as a business venture, placing them squarely in
| the entrepreneuring class. It's just that libjpeg-turbo doesn't
| seem to be very successful from a monetization standpoint.
|
| > It's very unfortunate that software engineers, especially the
| good ones able to create libraries used by pretty much
| everyone, seem to lack the drive to monetize their work
|
| It seems quite obvious to me that most open source libraries
| are used by pretty much everyone _because_ they are free to
| use. Personal projects rapidly become unfeasibly expensive if
| you need to pay even just a few bucks for 30-50 dependencies
| each, and businesses have procurement procedures around
| purchases that tremendously inflate the real cost of purchasing
| something. "Free" is the only price at which such friction is
| avoided, and so is the only price at which software spreads to
| large amounts of users.
| msla wrote:
| That's why we have the Copyleft licenses like the GPL, which
| are also Open Source.
| pjc50 wrote:
| You're looking at open source from the production side, but
| have you thought about the consumption side? I'm old enough to
| remember when Sun Microsystems expected you to pay for a C
| compiler.
|
| Imagine trying to write Javascript when every package you
| import incurs a license fee.
|
| > This would also foster competition between different solution
| offerings
|
| In practice, it seems not to work out that way: the nadir was
| probably the early 90s, when Microsoft had killed off all the
| competing PC operating systems and Jobs had yet to return to
| Apple.
| demindiro wrote:
| In my opinion, excess greed is far more harmful.
|
| I am very glad I get to use open-source software at no cost.
| There are profiteers, sure, but I believe in the end open-
| source software will be more beneficial for society as a whole
| as it is much easier to reuse code.
| [deleted]
| tuyiown wrote:
| It's pretty simple. Developing and sharing open source work is
| paid hobby at best. There is almost no other rewards, even to
| try improving one's employability is hazardous at best. Always
| have, always is. This a cause a lot of frustration to people
| that expected anything else, but it's true to most non-
| economically motivated work.
|
| It's done, or should be done, by people that want to build
| things they like and share it. Any other use is just some kind
| of hidden or not so welcome motive, and seen for what it is.
| Billion dollars companies or not.
| meindnoch wrote:
| This is why we have AGPL. The testament for its effectiveness
| is the visceral revulsion it evokes from "entrepreneur" types.
| PathfinderBot wrote:
| > The testament for its effectiveness is the visceral
| revulsion it evokes from "entrepreneur" types.
|
| Exactly. It is interesting to me that GP uses the word "open
| source" while entirely missing the point of free software
| [1], and how copyleft licenses were designed to resist
| corporations taking from the commons without contributing
| back from the start.
|
| > "Free" and "open" are rivals for mindshare. Free software
| and open source are different ideas but, in most people's way
| of looking at software, they compete for the same conceptual
| slot. When people become habituated to saying and thinking
| "open source," that is an obstacle to their grasping the free
| software movement's philosophy and thinking about it. If they
| have already come to associate us and our software with the
| word "open," we may need to shock them intellectually before
| they recognize that we stand for something else. Any activity
| that promotes the word "open" tends to extend the curtain
| that hides the ideas of the free software movement.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point....
| Guid_NewGuid wrote:
| This is confusing to me.
|
| Rather than one or two good, open, reference implementations
| everyone uses you'd rather have multiple proprietary solutions?
| That seems worse for people who want to learn from a commons of
| knowledge and hugely inefficient and a waste of time.
|
| I can see an argument for copyleft style licenses for this
| stuff (though I fundamentally disagree with them, freedom based
| on copyright that requires police and courts to enforce isn't
| free) but you appear to be arguing for completely closed
| solutions, though I assume I'm misunderstanding?
| tpush wrote:
| Monetization of open source only really works if
|
| a) the non-commercial usage is restricted, so there's a reason
| to buy a commercial license, and
|
| b) The copyright is assigned to a singular person or entity so
| there's no confusion as the recipient of money.
|
| Sadly both of these things conflict with Open Source either
| definitionally ("no restrictions on use") or in spirit ("single
| copyright holder/CLA means no or an exploited community").
| planede wrote:
| There are probably a ton of projects that depend on libjpeg-
| turbo, but the first thing that comes to mind are browser
| vendors. It's probably fair to say that most jpegs are viewed in
| web browsers. They should really just chip in, or even formally
| employ the author to just continue working on this library.
| st_goliath wrote:
| FWIW, Mozilla has been maintaining their own fork for quite a
| while now[1]
|
| But AFAIK most Linux Distros have been using libjpeg-turbo as a
| drop-in replacement for libjpeg, after some drama in ~2010
| where libjpeg came under new management, decided to break
| ABI/API several times over and add incompatible, non-standard
| format extensions[2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libjpeg#History
| muizelaar wrote:
| Firefox doesn't use mozjpeg, it just uses libjpeg-turbo:
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/media/libjpeg
|
| Mozilla has sponsored libjpeg-turbo in the past:
| https://libjpeg-turbo.org/About/Sponsors
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > add incompatible, non-standard format extensions
|
| and change the down-/upsampling algorithm for images with
| chroma subsampling such that it tends to introduce additional
| artefacts, because when decoding e.g. a classic 4:2:0
| subsampled image (i.e. chroma resolution is half the luma
| resolution both horizontally and vertically), each subsampled
| 8x8 chroma block is now upscaled _individually_ to 16x16 for
| the final image, which can and does introduce additional
| artefacts at the boundaries between each 16x16 px block in
| the final image. But the current libjpeg maintainer insists
| on that new algorithm because it is mathematically more
| beauftiful...
| phkahler wrote:
| >> But the current libjpeg maintainer insists on that new
| algorithm because it is mathematically more beauftiful...
|
| Ugh. That always has to take a backseat to functionality
| and usefulness. Well, if you want to serve users and not
| just yourself.
|
| I'm still in the thinking phase of a major rewrite of a big
| piece of code that will make it bug-free, but it will
| likely be very ugly due to a large number of
| cases/variations to handle. I'll spend a little more time
| looking for an elegant simplification, but it has to be
| done one way or the other to fix the ecisting bugs.
| planede wrote:
| Interesting, however I found this in the mozjpeg readme:
|
| > MozJPEG is a patch for libjpeg-turbo. Please send pull
| requests to libjpeg-turbo if the changes aren't specific to
| newly-added MozJPEG-only compression code. This project aims
| to keep differences with libjpeg-turbo minimal, so whenever
| possible, improvements and bug fixes should go there first.
|
| So they still rely on upstream development of libjpeg-turbo.
| Unless the readme is out of date and they don't bother
| syncing with libjpeg-turbo now.
| bscphil wrote:
| Right, it's not a proper fork. It's actually just a static
| set of patches that improve the compression ratio in
| libjpeg-turbo but can't be upstreamed, for reasons.
| dzogchen wrote:
| Although MapLibre Native is primarily a vector-tile based maps
| renderer, we also support raster images and we depend on
| libjpeg-turbo for it.
| jacknews wrote:
| meanwhile a hedge-fund manager somewhere probably just paid
| themselves 10s of millions for having some sneaky
| trading/M&A/roll-up idea and executing it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What does that have to do with this?
| transfire wrote:
| Would it help if ISPs levied a small "tax" which would get
| distributed to visited/liked sites?
| mkl wrote:
| No, because the sites would have no obligation to pass it on to
| people like the author of libjpeg-turbo whose work they use.
| Someone wrote:
| Indeed. For evidence as to how 'well' that would work, look
| at the music industry.
|
| I don't think software is different enough from music to make
| a difference.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| The solution is probably to do what academics do. Write grant
| proposals.
|
| https://nlnet.nl/news/2023/20230401-call.html
|
| If you want to write OSS for a living get good at writing grant
| proposals. There's money out there, but you have to know where it
| is and you have to ask for it.
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