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
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.
http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view=story=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
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,
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
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
> 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
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
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
