FOSS-friendly cameras and gear

Sony does. There’s some kind of SDK available for it but on what terms I’m not sure.

The GoPros run with Linux, but it has absolutely no benefits for the FOSS community.
The RAW format isn’t even supported by any open source program.

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Canon can’t shut down CHDK/ML… If they could I be they would

Not necessarily. One purpose of the “control” these brands try to keep over their cameras is that they could face litigation because someone broke his camera using CHDK or MagicLantern. So, the easy thing for them would be to make the camera load only signed software (UEFI anyone?). FOSS licenses allow you to make your own derivatives, they don’t make it mandatory for the camera to run it.

And they haven’t done it yet. It could well be out of ignorance, or just because they think that the confidential audience isn’t worth locking out, since letting them play is generating a lot of goodwill and part of the brand attractiveness to tinkerers, who are often consulted by acquaintances before purchasing a camera.

The TiVoization clause of the GPL3 is supposed to prevent that.

Why should Canon care? They don’t release anything under GPL.

If they wanted to take down ML the have something better though: lawyers. Even if everything ML do was perfectly legal (IANAL so I won’t comment on that) they could still use the power of their big wallets to make it impossible for the free community to face the charges.

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If they wanted to generate goodwill here they wouldn’t have stopped USB remote control of their compact cameras (SCNR).

is anyone using the blackmagic cams? They opensourced their RAW format. I am planning to buy a new camera for photo and video production next year after switching everything to Linux.

Update, because I just got an :heart: for this comment. This post is three years old and no longer true.

  1. GoPro provides a FOSS command line tool to decode the images: GitHub - gopro/gpr: General Purpose Raw image format
  2. Thanks to @LebedevRI darktable supports the GPR files too.
  3. LibRaw now supports this files too.

There are at least two example files in https://raw.pixls.us/. You can use them for tests but the files are already from 2017/2018. Perhaps you can get some more recent test files from somewhere.

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oh great, I dodn’t know the site, thank you very much!