"In terms of licenses: GPL is all you get for now. I can always add more liberal licenses later. LGPL for a decoding library, or maybe even MIT? We'll see, I'm not in a hurry."
https://boards.openpandora.org/topic/18485-free-lossless-ima...
(Edit: As I clarified, I meant usable for adoption in other non-GPL projects. But OK, I deserve the downvotes for adding very little, and will think twice before posting such a reply next time)
Pure bullshit. Unusable for whom? Proprietary software developers? That's the intent.
Apple and Google won't touch GPLv3, so that means this image format is dead on arrival as a web format.
Sure you can use it locally to compress your photographs, cool. But it won't be a web standard with GPLv3.
Google is currently using webp everywhere, too, despite no major browser actually supporting webp.
(I do not consider Chrome a browser, but mal- and spyware)
But even the FSF recommend sometimes using don't-care-about-user-freedom licenses for strategic reasons, for example driving adoption of a new free codec...
Their reasons being things like added security risk, lack of demand, lack of support in other browsers, patent risk etc, which all apply just as much to this format.
If you want to use it commercially without publishing source, just buy a licence from the author. Buying licences isn't exactly uncommon. Or are OS X/iOS/Windows also unusable for you?
And the author delivered: With GPL3 source.
> Also commercial "standards" by one party are worthless
Very true, but I can't see how that applies to this project? First, the existence of this repository doesn't preclude proper standardization. Second, the reference implementation is freely licensed, not commercial.
The opposite, going from something like MIT or BSD doesn't require ANYONE to be okay with it, the license permits it.
My point was, if he had released his code as MIT/BSD and then wanted to change it to GPL it would be fairly ineffective -- people could still use the old MIT/BSD version in their proprietary products.
It is a lot easier to restrict now and liberalise later once more thought has been given to the options, than it is to draw things back in later if you decide you want more control for any reason.