Here’s Nikon’s reasoning when they tried to encrypt the white balance metadata in NEF files:
As a proprietary format, Nikon secures NEF’s structure and processing through various technologies. Securing this structure is intended for the photographer’s benefit, and dedicated to ensuring faithful reproduction of the photographer’s creative intentions through consistent performance and rendition of the images.
For plain uncompressed raws it is indeed baffling, but they might be hoping to make some cash by creating licensing deals with Capture One, Adobe et al. For the compressed formats, the algorithms are in some cases licensed from third-parties or even patented, so they couldn’t release the specification if they wanted to.
Yes I am plenty aware of that. But we are not trying to replace lightroom. If you are and it works for you, that’s great. Part of the reason I say that is because people read “free lightroom replacement” and think its some sort of 1:1 clone, which it is not.
“Competes” is doing a lot of heavy living there. Let me check our advertising budget… Oh wait! Let’s give our great devs a raise… Oh wait! We exist in a world with other software that does the same thing not convinced we “compete” for users or market share.
I made sure the camera I wanted to buy was supported because this is the software I wanted to use. Its part of my workflow and I don’t want to change it.
“You guys do all the work of coding, researching, reverse engineering, and supporting this software, BUT! It is not enough and you should do more work maintaining relationships for my own personal benefit” – as you can see when I rephrase what you’ve said, this is not a good take.
As another said, we don’t really have problems procuring raw samples.
I don’t, but I am just really tired of the entitled, unthoughtful takes that I read regularly.
There are many valid criticisms of darktable, and the team welcomes those and is open to change and new ideas, but this isn’t one of them.
Camera support in DT is currently provided by two different libraries: RawSpeed and LibRaw. Right now RawSpeed is, for all intents and purposes, a one-man project, and until someone competent in C++ (or maybe Rust) decides to step up to the plate, that’s going to limit the pace of development. The LibRaw devs, as explained already, do what they do, and the DT devs and users can do nothing about it. As it happens, LibRaw is used for CR3 files because the RawSpeed maintainer hasn’t had time to integrate the support, not because there are no raw samples.
to be precise: darktable isn’t just open source, it’s free open source. And that’s a world of its own. It’s not about a business model to get market share and revenue but about sharing a tool deveoped by enthusiasts with others.
If someone expect something different there’s a quite simple way to achieve it: contribution.
that can be code, bug reports, testing or just suggestions with a good explanation why something is beneficial to the project (market share isn’t such thing)
and then respect the prioritization of the time spent by each developer …
it’s not about how people call something - see same for people calling darktable to be a lightroom replacement - but to proper use terms to meet expectations
Several companies spend a whole bunch of money to check “open source” labeled stuff to avoid legal issues
