The purpose here is not to replace Pantone entirely, but to be able to represent Pantone colors somewhat faithfully in digital documents. Pantone does provide official RGB approximations, but apparently you can't use them in an Adobe product anymore. This is meant as an alternative.
The creator does have experience producing physical paints and pigments
Unless the creator can overnight formulated inks to my print shop, it is not a practical alternative to Pantone, because Pantone’s business is selling consistency in markets where consistency matters.
I am not saying it is not a nice piece of work, but it is only applicable where consistency doesn’t matter very much…and though that is most of the time for most people regarding most things, what you get correlates with what you pay for.
So if I have a file that was using some spot colors such as PANTONE 576 C, I can sub those colors for TEMPLETONE+ 576 C, which look the same on screen.
When I send that to your print shop you could presumably do the reverse process, then print with the same inks you did last week. Everyone is happy, except for PANTONE.
Making it harder to describe your product in terms of Pantone colors hurts them, which is the dumbest part of this situation.
That doesn't sound right. Pantone is a for-profit company who doesn't get paid unless you pay something to them. They do not get any money from you just using anything Pantone.
If Pantone was a non-profit/FOSS project then sure, they would be happy for any type of usage. But they're not, so not sure why they should be happy if people are not paying.
Because of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33389848 your use of Pantone colors for free causes your print shop to spend huge sums on Pantone goods and services.
FWIW I don't think this "freetone" library is very practical. Pros who need it will pay the $15/mo to pantone, in addition to the $99/mo they pay to Adobe.
By “my print shop” I meant one I am in a business relationship with.
But it would be great. Two differently produced paints would look the same under all lighting conditions.
Regardless of that, you could also make a physical model of the human retina, and use that to remove any parts from the model that you think are redundant.
Also, the tools that Pantone uses to map colors have some kind of built-in physical model already, I suppose (not a Pantone expert obviously).
Cost of doing business.
Okay, Adobe and Pantone have decided to do a bold business decision that breaks existing files. That's their perogative. But in terms of minimizing bridge burning, their goal should be to fail tactfully and with as little lossage as possible. For a comparable, if you loaded a 12-bit-per-channel high-dynamic-range file in a software stack that only supported 8 bits per channel, the right answer is to discard the least significant bits, not just throw up your hands.
A more acceptable degradation would have been to say "the Pantone colours have been replaced with approximations matches in CMYK/RGB/whatever. If you save the file again, the Pantone data is stripped out."
I don't quite think Adobe would be allowed to do that though. If what Adobe was previously licensing on your behalf was the translations from Pantone codes to RGB/CMYK and the files saved with Pantone colors only have Pantone codes, then the best you could do is list the missing colors and ask the user to manually substitute in color choices from available color spaces for each missing color.
This is wrong, you can still use the rgb approximations.
There is obviously value in Pantone and what they do but the digital representation of Pantone's colours should be treated the same way APIs are.