What type of applications are we allowing here on the forum?
Historically, we’ve allowed Play Raw edits as long as there was FOSS in the editing chain somewhere. Now it seems with some new edits, we seem to be shifting towards FOSS only.
Where do we draw the line? Note that we support applications on Windows and macOS; do we stop supporting those? It also seems that GMIC is now available in a bunch of proprietary editors because of a new plugin wrapper… Do we not support those?
Note: posts have been moved here from other threads.
I am stuck with Windows for the lack of alternatives. It’s getting better though CAD and NURBS/Solid support is nowhere close to Rhino or Solidworks. By the time that get addressed, I won’t have to use Windows anymore.
As for G’MIC, I think we already have a dedicated thread for that.
A light version is available for free. The full blown version is not free: 30 euro for non-commercial or 85 euro for commercial use. No links to the source.
This product also seems to be available for Windows only.
I didn’t want the tone of my reply to sound too negative. Guess I succeeded…
If I’m being totally honest: This software isn’t FOSS and, if one wants to post here on pixls, it shouldn’t be used as base to do edits. Just my 2c though!
This is a website that lives and breathes FOSS, which has been pointed out to people many times and often by you (as a mod). I know that those were about edits done solely with a non FOSS product, but where do we draw a line?
Posting edits with Affinity or SNS-HDR as starting point before FOSS software is OK? How about Lightroom before Krita or Photoflow before some finishing touches in Photoshop? I think that will become, or already is?, a slippery slope to be honest.
Just to be clear: I’m not talking about totally banning non FOSS software. There are times that, as an example or in rare cases when something absolutely cannot be done in FOSS, that posting the end result would be fine. Telling exactly
why non FOSS was used would be almost mandatory in that case.
If the normal workflow that one uses always contains a non FOSS product, regardless of its position in the flow, they should post the end result elsewhere.
To add to my previous reply and the general question asked in this topic:
This is what’s on the pixls home page: Free/Open Source Photography
I think that is a good starting point (s/Photography/Multimedia/). All should basically be done with FOSS. But…
That holds up for the Play Raw and Showcase category, the other ones should basically be about FOSS, but posting examples from non FOSS can be very helpful/educational and is needed at times.
Contrary to my Yes! in my previous post I’m not a fan of actually removing posts that break the FOSS rule. But pointing it out to people is the least that should be done. Not sure about the posts of repeat offenders, that burden lies by the moderators…
About the G’MIC example: G’MIC itself is FOSS if I’m not mistaken, so no problem there. I do not think that proprietary software that contains FOSS shouldn’t be allowed though.
Talking about Play Raw and Showcases now: Are you really in favour of people posting their edits on pixls that were made by doing a basic RAW conversion with dcraw and the rest in Photoshop? Or using Ligthroom and Krita combo?
Aren’t there already enough sites that can hosts these kind of edits? One of the things that attracts me to pixls is the strong FOSS mentality and what I thought to be FOSS “rule”.
If pixls allows non FOSS edits (with a bit of FOSS added in) I’m afraid that we will be flooded with Ligthroom, Capture One and Photoshop based edits in the Play Raw and Showcase areas.
Sorry for making so much confusion, but as I stated SNS-HDR Lite is freeware and I thought in the first processing step I could use it.
As I wrote I do it out of laziness, after all I can and I use darktable…
Further steps I do in GIMP.
If this has offended erudite people I withdraw.
It’s definitely not our role to check if people are using FLOSS or not (or to force them using FLOSS), but to welcome, advise and discuss with people who have a more or less strong interest in FLOSS. In any case, people who have no interest in FLOSS won’t come to pixls.us.
We, developers, are making FLOSS to remove constraints from software users (price constraints, privacy constraints, …). Let’s not add artificial constraints to accept people in a discussion forum.
As long as the atmosphere is good, I don’t see any problem of having interesting discussions with users of proprietary software!
I agree with you! But this might be what I’m somewhat(?) afraid of; People coming in and showing (off) how “good” their edit made with proprietary software is.
I don’t see any harm done to the F(L)OSS attitude if pixls limits certain areas (Play Raw and Showcase as examples) to FOSS only.
There is definitely nothing wrong with discussing and showing in all the other areas in my opinion.
To my knowledge this has not happened yet (on pixls.us).
And if that happens, I don’t think the person is necessarily going to do that too often, if the feedback he gets is “cold” (and if he’s just doing that to piss us off, it will be quite easy to manage).
