AP is not the maintainer of Ansel anymore, he passed the torch on to @Jiyone a while ago, see Ansel | Welcome the new Ansel maintainer
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Iām confused, āAnselā in photography means only one thing. Ansel Adams, a class 9 international trademark. How can they legally avoid infringement? Not only does the use of the word Ansel dilute the Ansel Adams brand, but it implies endorsement.
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I do agree with many of your UI general points. I like the idea of making better use of the mouse buttons, especially right click. Right-click leading to context menu does seem to me to be a good and useful principle. And masks are far too easy to delete accidentally. Usually easily recovered with a CTRL-Z. I got used to that, and it would be easy to say no big deal. But why, in the first place, should that become necessary?
I wonder what you think of the crop module? 
Why canāt I grow or shrink a crop using the mouse wheel, preferable relative to that point? Could we not use Return to show the cropped picture?
Not big deals; nothing I am not used to working with.
Some improvements have been made to masking recently. I just read that @masterpiga has a whole lot more to suggest.
The darktable interface should, of course, remain familiar to dt users. But it is not inscribed in stone: changes are and will be made.
I am not in favour of āthe new usersā as a criterion for change. New users are new for a shot time only and it is absolutely not worth putting time and effort into making things more familiar-from-other-packages for them.
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But does that make the simple āAnselā fall under that protected trademark?
It occurs as a first name and as a family nameā¦(see Wikipedia)
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Interestingā¦ I did some diggingā¦ āAnselā is not a register trademarkā¦ but āAnsel Adamsā is.
This is what I foundā¦
āBased on Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, The, the ANSEL ADAMS trademark is used in the following business: PRINTS AND PRINTED MATERIALS, NAMELY, BOOKS, BOOKLETāS, BOOKMARKS, PHOTOGRAPHS, POSTERS, CALENDARS, NOTEPADS, STATIONERY.ā
So, the trademark is about publishing his photoās in als kind of shapes and forms. As Ansel is not directly about thatā¦ that is not a direct trademark infringement.
However, the name Ansel in the context of the software, Is clearly referring to Ansel Adams. And it is not named after the person creating it. Also the website ansel.photos quotes him.
So it is not a clear caseā¦ But If I was behind Anselā¦ I would be looking for a different nameā¦ I donāt like a lot of lawyers go after me
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Iām not sure what we mean by maintainer in this context. AP still regularly commits changes straight to master without going through a PR process. Feels like a maintainer to me
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In the projects I have been in, this wasnāt even allowedā¦ maintainer or not, main architect or not, a code review by someone else was a strict requirementā¦ There was actually a term for people that did want commit straight to master without going through a PR process: unguided projectilesā¦
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To me another problem resulting from the naming seems to be a huge burden. Naming something with such a ābig nameā in photography, whow.
Yep, if it would be a commercial product, it could come across are āmisleadingāā¦ the name could across as āuse our software and your pictures will look like Anselā Adamāsā
And I personally find it very disrespectful towards one the great names in the history of photography. For me it shows the arrogance of itās creatorsā¦ Another reason not to use it.
I would personally not choose such a name, but calling everybody involved in that project arrogant is unfounded and unfair, IMHO.
The name has been chosen by just one person, and we do not have āSippenhaftungā (family liability) here, hopefully.
BTW, thereās Nvidia Ansel, Horde Ansel, an Ansel camera bag, ā¦
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I donāt see a problem with this. He was clearly the lone developer of the fork for months and knows his way around the codebase. Minor changes or fixes going straight to master is not surprising and this just looks like nitpicking, just check the closed PRs, clearly almost everything goes through a PR.
ā
IMO this thread should be closed along with every other AP/Ansel thread, it gets tiresome to read stuff like this day after day and diverges from the spirit of this forum.
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I would find it really inappropriate to close every Ansel related thread, as long as its a factual and fair discussion. After all, this is āa forum for giving a voice to everyone in the F/OSS photography communityā.
But I find it sad, that every Ansel related thread seems to sooner or later turn into an AP behavior discussion - maybe we can avoid this?
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Neither fan-boyism.
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If that was a thing from the past, I would very much agree. But given that video it is not. And then if people press me āyou should tryā , āyou should tryā, then that rant in the video does plays a significant role at least fore me.
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Is this addressed at me?
Been talking about this in chat too, and the obvious answer is for the current maintainer to remove all the derogatory things which add nothing to the ansel project from their website, docs, etc etc. Thatād be the first place to start.
If the new maintainer really wants to get away from the negativity in this particular community, then removing all the negative things and forking/renaming the project is probably a good idea. It signal a want to get away from that sort of thing to everyone else here. But so far, thatās been a no-go. So here we are.
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There are only about 200 mostly small PRs, total, in the Ansel repo and Iād guess thousands of commits since it was forked, mostly straight to master. I donāt mind this in a new fast moving fork tbh. I was more making the point that if AP had retired or stepped back as maintainer I would hope heād either not be committing anything or heād be expected to run everything past the new maintainer via the PR process.
Generally the more participants you have, the more you should try to follow a process when making changes
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An older thread where the trademark thing was already discussed.
Ansel spent years bashing one of his contemporaries because he hated his style. Mortensenās style was all about creativity in the darkroom. Ansel was all about pristine capture and natural development, and even called Mortensen the Anti-Christ of photography or whatever. The irony fails to escape me.
I too scrubbed thru the video and found at every point was something about $#!+ Darktable this and $#!+ Darktable that. That guy could make a run for US president. The author clearly has stepped well over the fringes of inappropriateness into blatant harassment. How embarrassing to witness a 4.5 hour delivery of such.
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Hello,
Sorry,
This video is simply a reflection of what he already wrote on his website (āDarktable: crashing into the wall in slow-motionā).
It always comes back to the same issues:
- Ad hominem attacks and contempt towards users, contributors and developers.
- Refusal to collaborate, treating his own vision as the sole truth.
- Constant provocation as a communication strategy.
In a collaborative open-source community like PIXLS.US, there is no place for this. Technical criticism is healthy and necessary, but repeated personal insults ruin constructive dialogue.
Our communityās energy should be spent on positive development. Wasting time on these controversies distracts from constructive work, whether on official Darktable or on forks developed with mutual respect.
As long as that article remains online, I will never use Ansel on principle. Ceasing to give visibility to this type of content on the forum is the most logical step to keep the community healthy.
Greatings from the LubƩron,
Christian
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Excellent point about character vs usefulness.
Is Jensen Huang at Nvidia a good person? Who knows? Or the people at AMD? Or the honchos at Apple? Or Nadella? Or anybody involved in any of the products and services in their supply chain? Or ā¦ take your pick. And yet, do we use any of the products they sell? Probably at least some of them.
Why spend energy talking about the personality of someone involved with a forked project that may have some useful ideas? Judging by one or two of the comments here, it sounds like the DT devs are following Ansel and incorporating ideas they think are helpful. If the DT devs can put aside any personal feelings about the folks at Ansel, then maybe thatās a productive approach. Certainly less stressful.
At the end of the day, itās just software.
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