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Comment by zackchen | Hacker News Reader

This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.

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The history section of the repo clears it up [0]

> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.

> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.

Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.

[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Same old story, too much support requests and bad actors making it hard to make money off opensource.

This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.

LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.

The person you're replying to was making a clarification on the license, not arguing about the validity of changing the license or charging for it.

Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.

I think aseprite is a perfectly fine project, but where possible, I like to use open source tools rather than proprietary tools.

I have paid for Aseprite, but on many machines I just install the old GPL version, usually available as a package. It is fine for most tasks, even if the latest version has many improvements.

A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.

It's good to have open source software.

It's good to support honest and high quality proprietary software.

Aseprite offers the latter good, this offers the former good.

Aseprite is source available nowadays, not open source. Libresprite was then forked off of the last commit of Aseprite before the license was changed from the GPL.

1. Asperite is not open source.

2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.

Aseprite is open source. The source is open for anyone to access right here: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.

"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source".

"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

You are right. I've been corrected. I misunderstood their licence to be on the distributable, not the source. I'll take my misunderstanding home now.

How can you say its open source and 3 sentences later that it has a proprietary license.

Their EULA forbids distributing the software, hence not open source.

You are describing source available. That is not the same as open source.

Thanks, I see my mistake! Can't correct my post but I'll take this into future thinking.

Source available is not open source. Don’t try to redefine what open source means. It’s so insulting to volunteers hard work.

Apologies to every OSS contributor for my misunderstanding then.

Aseprite is such a joy to use that I paid for it just to support the developers

It’s also really cheap!

Agreed, and it's also available on Steam! I really like the way they handle onion skinning as well, and there's a surprising number of useful plugins (such as tweencel) for it.

I think Libresprite is a fork of Aseprite from before it changed its license. In that context, maybe not a big deal.

didn't even realize Aseprite is source available!

I highly recommend paying for Aseprite, it's a very good little tool.

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