Our value proposition is doing this all correctly for you. The LUT is not the biggest thing here, as we attempt to describe on our marketing page.
The things I mentioned will get people close, or at the very least set them on the right track. Perhaps some of them will be inspired push the envelope and contribute their research back to the commons instead of guarding it in order to collect rent.
I swear to god, this website is so infuriating.
If you would like to learn more about this topic you can look at Steve Yedlin’s discussion of the matter https://www.yedlin.net/index.html or look at some of the technical documents linked from our website.
I posted elsewhere that I thought this would be cooler if it was open source. My comment fell flat and was modded down a lot, I felt a little bad about it. Now I see this and I'm glad I posted. You post an ad for your paid software, in Show HN, then you get upset when people point out open source alternatives and criticize you for your business model. OK
We are hardly the first company to sell software, nor post about it on this website. Proprietary software is ethical.
Responding to your post is not "an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society". Such nonsense!
I don't believe this is true. I can't square creating something that can be duplicated essentially for free to provide value to people with denying that value to people in order to enrich myself.
I also take issue with the practice of software as a service specifically, and while I see that you provide a perpetual license, without pro-rating monthly payments toward a perpetual license you're creating a psychologically abusive system to extract value from people with that model same as most SaaS.
I'm not sure what you're doing is bad on net, probably the world is better off for the solution you've developed despite the aspects of it that I find problematic. I understand how hard it is to make "good" choices with regard to this stuff on a personal level, and I place most of the blame on the systems that surround us.
I think the ideas/memes I'm sharing/championing here are deeply important to the continued freedom/growth of the human race in concert with computers. I'm not trying to be mean to you or put down your product or belittle your effort. I understand probably deeper than most what it takes to do this and what you have done is impressive. That doesn't make it right. I don't have the answers, I'm not even trying to tell you "stop selling your shit and open source it immediately". I live in the real world too.
I'm very worried that most people are not even thinking about the questions/implications of artificial scarcity and how tacitly okay we are with it as a society, that's why I'm so loud about this.
But it’s so interesting to imagine a world where it’s unethical to release a film for purchase on your website, or for HBO to make an original show, or an independent journalist to publish a newsletter on Substack. Or where the only way to access music is by unnecessarily creating disposable petrochemical discs.
If we were to imagine a future society where our basic needs were met, with UBI or some other form of welfare for all (which I thoroughly support) — selling all these things would be even less unethical!
In such a world people who enjoy the physicality etc. would get petrochemical disk based music, most people would just download a file or stream. The unethical thing is denying others the right to copy and modify, the unethical thing is intellectual property.
Yes, I too support UBI but I think your conclusion is wrong, it becomes much much LESS ethical to try and deny people access to data if you don't need to make money to be alive/healthy/happy. Why try to create inequality in a situation where it's so unnecessary? What's the point?
That said, IP laws are too strong. Exclusive IP rights should probably only last about 20 years, among other changes. I think someone who was alive when Star Wars came out should be able to create their own Star Wars movie before they die. I had a very interesting and stressful conversation with David Simon, creator of The Wire on Twitter about this, where he vehemently disagreed.
Re: UBI "happy" is doing a lot of work there. It relates to the "basic" of UBI. Where's that line? IMO, an optimal target is to guarantee the approximate lifestyle of someone making perhaps $100,000 a year or so. Something comfortable but you're not buying yachts. Maybe a canoe or two. We should start at literally any number (probably somewhere around the poverty line) and raise it as politics allows as quickly as possible. I'd imagine that would take about 100 years. In that situation, I still think market effects would be useful to encourage and incentivize people to create new things and improve the world. Obviously we'd have a lot more information at that point to decide on the details!
As in, one where you'd release the source under a modified GPLv3, but any project created with it would also have to be under GPLv3 or CC-BY-SA? That'd allow your project to have a truly free software version for people who create free media projects (e.g., blender open movies).
Hardly a criticism, more just a complaint about capitalism in general it seems. Which I don't expect a software shop to be the ones to solve...
I sadly don't do anything with video editing anymore, and $129 per quarter to play with is a bit rich for me as a result, but I think what you're doing is pretty cool! I have always loved the "film look", and have found a lot of (though not all of) the film filters in the past to have a sort of "artificial" look to them. This one looks decidedly better.
(Obviously I then release everything I create under GPL, so others can use it freely and expand on it)
I support people undercutting businesses in their marketing post comment sections with Free as in beer or freedom solutions to achieve whatever's being sold. I believe in the ethicality of Free as in Freedom software, for one thing, but also in general information freedom. I feel gross about knowledge hoarding.
If you're a fan of capitalism, I think you should agree with me. Capitalist minded people can try to use Free software to extract labor for no cost (jokes on you, we extract your engineer's labor at cost to you when they get frustrated and start making commits at work), and Free software comes with other advantages. Furthermore, if you're investigating solutions to your business need to do filmic solutions, isn't it nice that there are hordes of us weirdos ready to help prevent you from spending money unnecessarily? If you're trying to sell filmic solutions, isn't it nice to be challenged on your business model publicly and specifically rather than scratch your head at poor sales with no idea how to add value?
Sidenote I was reminded of this comedy video: https://youtu.be/9kaIXkImCAM "Interview with an FFMPEG Enthusiast"
As an aside this is one of the funniest videos i've seen in a while, and totally captures the open source ux experience (i say in a loving joking way)
Now I still self-host a lot, but it's stuff that requires absolutely zero maintenance overhead. I admire people who are into self-hosting the whole stack, but it's not what I want to be doing. So I never moved off gmail, and I pay someone to host my cloud files. Life!
(Now ask me how many hours I spent getting a tiling window manager into a usable state. The number is a lot, and I feel bad about it, but now I have SUPER POWERED PRODUCTIVITY.)
/s obviously. But at least it's more like a really involved interior decorating project than reinventing power delivery to the home.