On December 26, 2010 06:09:45 pm Bruno Postle wrote: > This post by Peter Sikking is a good read and links to further > information on both the GIMP and Krita processes: > http://blog.mmiworks.net/2010/03/working-on-vision-with.html
excellent read indeed. > The basic approach that we should be taking it is to first decide what > Hugin is and who it is for rather than compiling lists of new features > (though I have a few of these too). I am not sure that Hugin needs this kind of soul-searching at this point in its history. Krita and Gimp are in a completely different situation, loosing speed and direction. Hugin on the other hand has been dynamic and thriving for the past four years and is still accelerating. That said, some musing is always a good way to share ideas, get on the same page, keep the vision current and relevant. Hugin is what you make of it for yourself. Here is my take. WHAT IS HUGIN IN MY OPINION Hugin is a research and learning playground. Its primary purpose is research and learning on computed manipulation of photographs. Hugin empowers innovation. It expands the envelope of what is possible with traditional imaging equipment beyond the limits of a single shot. The primary audience are people who like to open the hood and get their hands dirty; people who like to think out of the box, explore and experiment without pressure and without fear; people who like to scratch their own itches, all while collaborating in a team. Collateral benefit to other audiences are a welcome byproduct. Some of the features developed in and around Hugin end up in applied products. E.g. align_image_stack in LuminanceHDR or the lens distortion correction in a few RAW converters. We should make more efforts in this direction. But Hugin itself is more than a mere product. Hugin has a great track record for innovation: first end-to-end HDR tool; first stitching tool with editable masks; first stitching tool with a real- time interactive preview; just to name a few. In other areas it is a laggard (notably CP detection until recently) but that's OK too. WHAT HUGIN IS NOT IN MY OPINION Hugin is not a finished product serving a traditional audience of end-users - neither occasional nor professional. There are enough tools better suited for that. Hugin is not easy. It requires those coming to it to learn, understand, master, and apply the underlying principles. But once they do master it, they realize Hugin made them better photographers because they understand the underlying principles. THE OPEN SOURCE THING Hugin is hard core Open Source. Not for ideological reasons, but for the purely practical reason of viability. IMHO the Open Source development and community building models are absolutely superior to the models previously known from the proprietary world. Indeed these development and community building models and tools are being adopted by closed-source businesses. However these are only two of the aspects that influence the overall viability of a software project. The factors that make Hugin an all-or-nothing proposition in terms of Open Source vs. proprietary are the 'market' size (user base); the project size (contributors); and the distribution of knowledge and skills. The user base is small. Even if it is growing, stitching is unlikely to become mainstream any time soon. The most efficient ways of serving such a small user base are either a small boutique proprietary outfit, or a tightly knit Open Source community. The Open Source model works best when skills and knowledge are widely and evenly distributed. In areas with optimal distribution Open Source achieved significant market share and even market dominance without even trying. The distribution of skills and knowledge around Hugin is very uneven and to compensate for this, Hugin must prevent that its code base be taken proprietary. WHAT'S NEXT There are a lot of great ideas around, and I hope to see at least some of them implemented soon. The documentation is still incomplete and I intend to work on documenting at least those part of the process that I master. I believe this year we've increased the project's bandwidth/capacity at the same level of resources to absorb code change (Mercurial repo) and to keep track of the things to do (Launchpad tracker). There is still new code waiting to be integrated, and I hope we can run another year of Google Summer of Code and welcome another round of contributors and new features. And there are still plenty of tickets to be processed. I hope we can bring them to a manageable size too. Happy 2011! Yuv
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