We have a problem - what is it about Ansel and AP? (Edit - concern fully resolved via respectful dialogue)

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After probably about a year off this site, with rarely a contribution from me, I’m browsing some of the closed Ansel thread, and discover that there has been some “electricity” between Aurelien Pierre and others in the Open Source community, and about 3 hours or so ago, I open a thread to appreciate what AP has been to me, the one who made me understand what’s really going on with digital photography with his explanations of the core concepts, that I have not heard from anywhere else, and this is supported by his work on relevant modules in darktable.

Lo and behold, I’m moderated immediately with the thread locked. ! I don’t have any opportunity to respond to the three or four responses. None. I’m shut out asap. Interesting.

Now I’m scratching my head wondering, what could I have said, that would have, caused a mention of Ansel and AP to receive such drastic action.

I recall a darktable where I could not get on with it because there was no amount of curve fitting that could address the non specific match of the old base curve with the profile of the camera I was using when I started to learn digital photography and darktable - an old Fuji.

Filmic rgb was what saved the day, after getting through the learning curve of the scene referred and display referred pipelines, and differences between - all of this huge credit to AP for pushing through these ideas.

I am a bit puzzled. Is the only topic open here software, and features. No room to discuss the people like Ansel and now Aurelien Pierre who have made great strides in our understanding of photography, definitely mine. Its ok to discuss tools and features but not the people behind them.

I expect based on what just happened, this thread will soon be locked. A rather sad day for the forum at Pixls.us. We may disagree with his modus operandi, but the things he was aiming to express, such as the need to avoid redundant controls in user interfaces, make sense.

I of course have not read every single related thread with AP’s comments on pixls.us or on github repository for darktable, but I can imagine that the same single minded focus with which he identified that darktable needed major change of direction, and he went about learning the internals of darktable, actually learning how to develop software, and all the imaging maths/algorithms he had to research and apply - awesome dude.

In closing - if like other aspects of humanity, in addition to building software, it would be nice to have places where we can capture our "halls of fame"and cherish those who helped move things forward. At the back of my mind, I was hoping one of the major imaging or tech businesses would one day discover what was happening with darktable and maybe “invest”.

I’ll leave it here. I can imagine without having to check that AP is most likely no longer a contributor to darktable. What a way to go.

Anyway - darktable now has sigmoid, as I can imagine that there will be no further augmentation of filmic rgp and the other AP developed modules, now that the originator is gone.

This was such fun to read. Amusing.

Linus Torvalds earns 10 million dollars a year from open source, which is not really open - he makes all the decisions of what is the direction of Linux, and you can copy and do whatever you like with what he has decided, but he calls the shots, which is why Linux has remained relevant.

I think AP will now become the Linus Torvalds of image processing, and I sincerely hope it also makes him a few million dollars a year, producing consistent code, which gets more stable, with each release. May he also have a long life to achieve all this.

The Amazon’s, Microsoft’s, Apples, Paypals, Oracle, most of these things were driven by the determination of a key individual, for much of their history, and imaging needs an Ansel/AP approach, cos certain things are not achieved by committee. There has to be conviction, and the will to drive it through. Am not condoning bad behaviour, I sincerely think we can maintain civility at all times, but am reminded that Steve Jobs was not reputed to be the most civil individual, neither is Larry Page, certainly not Elon Musk, and you need to watch the documentaries on Jeff Bezos. None of these are the most polite people.

Interesting times. Would be interesting to see how long this thread stays open…

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What exactly do you think there is to discuss? He ejected himself from the darktable project by continually saying toxic things about not only the project, but the other people who participate in the project.

The way he spoke to and about people was 100% unacceptable on every level. The technical merits of his code, modules, vision and whatever else pale in comparison to his toxic behavior.

It is not sad at all. The conversations about him are not productive and are completely pointless.

We don’t “disagree” with his communication, it is completely abhorrent. Whether people agreed with his ideas about the UI and features don’t really matter and the merit of those ideas can be discussed individually. In fact, many agreed and still agreed with the points he was trying to make. But when you’re so toxic, then people end up disregarding not only you, but also the points you were trying to make.

This is obvious… maybe you should read them, or watch his youtube video where he continually insults and hurls profanities at other developers of darktable. It’s disgusting.

This is quite wrong, people like flannelhead are fixing bugs in those modules.

April Fool’s joke #1, thanks. This lightened my mood.

April fools joke #2, this made me laugh thank you again.

And it is this attitude that allows people like that to continue to be cruel. Humanity should demand better of people.

Ansel, the application not the photographer, has their own community now. Perhaps you can find your way there and heap your praise upon him directly.

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This is now borderline harassment, especially since you keep shining a spot light on someone who may have simply been having an off moment due to indigestion, or a bad hair day. Move on, perhaps.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But, remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

  • Name-calling.
  • Ad hominem attacks.
  • Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
  • Knee-jerk contradiction.

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

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it’s not ‚we‘ that have a problem :wink:

it’s not worth to discuss about people that are not present here.
If you want to discuss ansel stuff , you‘d better use the Ansel discussion platform, if you want to discuss darktable the darktable section ist the best place.
You need to get, that Ansel and darktable are going two different ways - because it’s the right of everyone to fork if having the opinion that that’s necessary.
you might reason about such decision, but it’s useless to do it at a place the originator of a fork isn’t present.

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If this is the case AP’s “bad hair day” has been going on three years now. He’s been making angry personal attacks on multiple forums for a very long time and if you’ve read everything you can find on every internet forum and website I guarantee you haven’t even seen half of what many people here have put up with.

Completely agree, and many of us made that argument to AP until we were blue in the face: disagree with ideas all you like, but don’t make it personal. But when you’re constantly insulted by someone you can no longer only “criticise his ideas” because he’s made it personal already and while he is expressing ideas and opinions he’s also mixing it with unnecessarily personal attacks.

Anyway the reason these conversations keep getting closed down is that many many of the regular contributors to this forum have been continually insulted by AP and cannot help but correct the record when self-admittedly-uninformed people come to his defence. If you wanted to express appreciation to him for what he’s done (and I do so here again for clarity) you can do so freely on this forum. But when you stir up other people to start arguing a controversial subject, I’m afraid it just looks like trolling.

So perhaps consider starting another thread where you list the things you like about what AP has contributed to darktable and ansel and leave it at that. If you can keep it on-topic I’m sure it won’t get closed.

Please lock this thread.

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This is a fast away to discredit all the people who Linus relies on and who make as many decisions as he does.

Ex: Greg Kroah-Hartman - Wikipedia

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I appreciate the great modules AP has created. I have no desire to do a character assassination of any one here, especially the generous developers of DT. But AP chose to leave this forum and the DT development team. As a DT user I felt he spoke very very harshly about the contributions of others and the modules they had created. I presume that was just his style. I hope Ap continues to make great editing modules and I hope they can be integrated in DT, Rawtherapee and other great FOSS programs. The problem with discussing AP’s contributions is the abrasive style with which he dealt with other members of this forum. I was surprised at how quickly your original post was shut down as I did not feel you had gone too far. Thanks for your post and welcome back to the forum.

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For me it was more about the argument that was going to be re-ignited than the actual content of the post. It was essentially a continuation of a thread that had already been locked because it got out of hand. This thread is essentially the same thing again. Make a post that just talks about what AP has done and not about what he has said or what others have said about him and I’m sure we can keep the discussion on topic.

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I am not sure that @OK1 was even aware of the post you were afraid of re-igniting. I may be mistaken. It seems a great shame to me that AP was abrasive in his dealings with people and even his videos when he bagged out the great work of other developers as if his way was the only correct way. Now I feel I am falling into the trap of character assassination which both you and me wanted to avoid in this post and the previous posts.

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I’m sure you’re right but that doesn’t really alter the argument for locking it before it got out of hand.

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DT is more than one developer. I tried Ansel and have chosen to stick with DT as it has so many more features that AP regards as bloat or rubbish. Filmic is good, but for some images Sigmoid or base curve, particularly base curve fusion can be the best way to go. What I like about DT is the freedom of choice.

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Being an RT user, I’m not familiar with DT; however, for me persnally, I’d be in a real fix if RT decided to remove features — many of them are an absolute necessity for my workflow. Having said that, I do understand and appreciate the drawbacks of maintaining less-popular modules.

I guess it’s a case of “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure”. I’m not familiar with the situation or circumstances discussed here, but by forking DT, at least there’s yet another option for users which is never a bad thing.

I really do hope that all involved can resolve their differences — there are so many awful things going on in the world right now, it would be nice to have some good news for a change. And to every single person involved in every single open-source project ever: you are all part of a very special and unique community, and I love you all dearly. :heart:

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Ah, welcome back zombie topic. It’s been so long… :wink:

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Aurelien Pierre was a cool guy. Personally I never saw his criticism as a personal attack but rather as passion for the software. I understand how many people were offended. But when you’ve put as much time and effort into the software as he did, you better believe he’ll be passionate about it.

Honestly, I miss him very much. I miss the long threads on this forum. I miss the disagreements, the aha moments, the long convoluted classical music related allegories. I really miss the guy being here and on matrix tbh.

The fact that this has been going on for so long really makes me sad. I thought DT devs and he would cool off and find a common ground in a few days or a week. But this has really been too much and very sad.

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100% agree with this post. AP was a character, he was passionate and created some innovative modules. I certainly appreciated his and everyone else’s contribution to DT.

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It was almost never the darktable devs who needed to cool off. I don’t think people realize this very much. Like everyone has said above, AP may have been in the right in his discussions with other developers, but he was the one going off the rails.

Displays like this one were common:

It keeps getting posted over and over again like this is an issue where the two parties need to come to an understanding, but that was already tried many times. You can’t come to an understanding with someone who more than once lost their cool and replied like that. Can’t reason with unreasonable people even if what they say is true.

Other devs have been in the right before but have they lost their cool like that? A good thing to consider.

I say this as a darktable user who only really started using it after scene-referred was implemented. His hard work was appreciated and changed darktable for the better in the end.

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did AP passed away? Or why all those obituaries?

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Ha, Ha. Funny troll post.

There’s no need for AP to carry off the way he does, it’s as simple as that.

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A lot of people have put in a lot of time to darktable doing one thing or another, and yet only he has felt it necessary to degrade others.

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