Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to see what the result would be if you took the best format for each individual image and added them together; would it be a significant difference over FLIF by itself?

The choice of GPLv3 licensing is unfortunate, since it will limit native browser support.

View on HN

That's the encoder, which isn't something browsers would usually bother with. The decoder is Apache licensed.

Thanks, I missed that. Still it means that e.g. Photoshop will never support it, leading to the same conclusion.

I'm open to negotiation if Adobe would want to include the FLIF encoder in Photoshop. The other contributors have signed a CLA that allows me to change the licensing to anything more permissive than GPLv3. So if Adobe wants it, they can pay for a non-copyleft license (e.g. Apache 2.0). If that ever happens, I'll be happy to share the licensing fees with the other contributors and donate some of it to the FSF.

Why would they want to pay? Unless the format is widely spread and the fee is much cheaper than implementing their own what interest do they have to pay? I feel it's the opposite now.

Also, Adobe Photoshop (or any other program) is of course free to dynamically link to the libflif library. The LGPL allows that.

Well, IANAL but I think the original creator of FLIF could still decide give a special license to Adobe if they want to negotiate one, no?

EDIT: practically confirmed elsewhere in the thread by the original author, with motivation:

> There is still a lot of room for improvement in the encoder, which is why (at least for now) it has the LGPL license, to ensure that improvements can be integrated in the reference implementation

IANAL either, but I suspect it would be between difficult and impossible to offer an alternate license once outside contributions are integrated.

Good point, I had forgotten about the viral aspect of the GPL. But it looks like Sneyers already thought of that too, luckily.

The decoder is under the Apache license. But yes otherwise GPLv3+

Reply on news.ycombinator.com