Am I missing something, or is this basically an unmaintained snapshot of Aseprite from 2016 (when it was last released under GPL)?
Since Aseprite has come a long way since then, interested parties might want to check there instead. It's free to compile from source, or binaries are $20 on steam. (But it's not libre free - IIRC the only restriction is that you're not allowed to redistribute the source.)
to your configuration.nix or shell.nix or whatever. If you want an ever newer version, you can of course override and bump the src past what nixpkgs is at.
Yeah... I'll try to write down my thoughts while using this website:
"Ah, an app for designing sprites? Cool, where are the screenshots? Maybe I can try the navigation? Ah, it's a single-page site, do I really need a navigation bar to jump to the individual paragraphs of text on this very short page? BTW, it's called "libre", so where's the source code? Ah, must be the GitHub icon under "social networks", riiiiight..."
Don't get me wrong, I'm a developer myself, and this looks exactly like the info page I might build for a project - it's a nice page, but it has some UX issues which you only notice if you look at it from a user's perspective.
Since it is a fork of aseprite [0], maybe that can give you an approximate idea of what it looks like. I mean some screenshots would be nice, sure, but maybe this helps you.
> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello.
Right there in on the page. The implication being that until the fork is mature, glancing at Aseprite screenshots should satisfy you. Cut the dev a little slack, this wasn't a show HN.
Cool to see this posted. I've been using it for the past few weeks while making some simple 2d games Godot (my winter hobby).
Overall it's been pretty good. Sometimes it slows down during tasks (a lot more than Photoshop or Clip Studio do while doing things like transforming a selection) but most of it works well. The animation features have been handy and were just simple enough to be useful.
If you're having performance issues on non-Windows, you might try twiddling around with the UI options. In particular, setting "Screen Scaling" to 100% and "UI Scaling" up to 200% to compensate seems to vastly improve performance on both my Pinebook, and even my gaming rig with a reasonably beefy AMD graphics card. I'm not sure why it makes such a big difference, but it's night and day for me in terms of jank and overall smoothness.
There is also Spriter. Its not open source but there is a free version and the paid version was a kick starter and they had it for sale at a low price on Humble bundle at times.
Usually when people use the term "open source", they'll be referring to an OSI-approved definition. I do distinguish between open source (lowercase) and Open Source (uppercase) but I'm in a minority on that point, most of your readers won't.
In general, "source available" or "shared source" are terms that will lead to less confusion in situations like this.
In terms of proprietary licenses, Aseprite is very good. It's one of the very, very few proprietary software products that I allow myself to use while developing games. But calling it open source is at best going to spark some disagreement/confusion, and at worst going to spark some needless debate from people (like me) who believe that the FOSS community needs to more closely guard how those terms are used and abused online.
Because they had a criteria and they conducted a review of lots of licenses. It's not any less "gatekeepery" if some random person or company takes their random license and says "here, we say this one license is open source based on our own criteria that we invented for ourselves, accept it."
You're confused. A person or company claiming some term indeed applies to something is not gate keeping. It's when the opposite happens, when a person or company denies you use of that term, for arbitrary reasons.
So, I'd say OSI is, by definition, designed to be the gatekeepers of "Open Source".
I would agree with you if anyone was saying "hey the term open source doesn't mean anything and you can use it for whatever you want" but that's not what I've ever seen happening, and I doubt anyone wants that because it would make the term useless. What we actually do see is other groups trying to promote their own alternate definition of the term and trying to deny the OSI's usage, for equally arbitrary reasons. It's the same form of gatekeeping. Please just come up with another phrase, that's what the OSI did after all when they found the term "free software" to be inadequate.
> Please just come up with another phrase, that's what the OSI did
I think a bit of a myth. There's documented existing use of the term in the same context before the OSI say they came up with it, and they were denied the trademark by the USPTO because it was an existing simply descriptive term.
I'm not saying they came up with the term before anyone in the world. While the term was used previously, it didn't have the concrete definition it does now. That's why they were able to do what they did.
You said 'just come up with another phrase' and that's what they didn't do - they took an existing phrase with a similar meaning, and started to tell everyone they were going to advocate a different meaning. And then tried to trademark it to steal it from the community!!
Sorry I didn't clarify -- They came up with a phrase that, while it existed, didn't have a concrete definition. To give an example, if someone right now wants to create "Source Available Initiative" or something like that I think that would conceptually be fine, even though the term is already in use, there is no organization that is clearly defining what it means. Does that explain it better? (Although I think creating more organizations like this is a terrible idea for other reasons, mostly having to do with license proliferation)
> "Source Available Initiative" or something like that I think that would conceptually be fine
I can understand that position but... they tried to trademark just 'open source' - without the 'initiative' part. They were told to rod off by the USPTO because you're not allowed to do that, so it's not ok by the law, whatever you think of it.
I wasn't speaking of the trademark, you don't need a trademark to publish and promote a public definition of a term. Misusing that term doesn't have legal consequences but it won't stop people from getting upset at you for misleading them, e.g. your customers getting miffed when they learn the "open source" option you provide actually means they can't do anything with the source at all that they would expect to be able to do with the popular Apache/MIT/GPL/BSD options. (Correct me if I'm mistaken, but just those 4 licenses seem to be used for the vast majority of open source now)
But fortunately, the overall community including the vast majority of people involved in packaging and distributing Open Source software agree with them, and in a lot of ways they do own the term and they do get to tell people what they can do with it.
You can go argue with every major Linux distro, the Homebrew devs, package managers, and most key Open Source advocates if you want. Get them to change their definitions and the software they accept, and then maybe you'll have a point.
But in the meantime, you shouldn't be surprised when the community lashes out at you for appropriating decades of PR and public education just because you don't like that the definition we've always used to describe ourselves doesn't fit a particular business model. OSI/GNU have authority on this subject because we the community grant them authority. We're not interested in people coming in and leeching off the goodwill of Open Source while simultaneously restricting users' rights.
We are as a community guarding our terminology because our terms have value, and OSI is the standardized, commonly understood definition that we have advocated for. If you want to call that gatekeeping, I don't care. I don't want Open Source to be like the "organic" aisle at the grocery store, I want it to mean something specific.
I just think if they'd picked an original term and trademarked it, the whole thing would be simpler. It could be Open Source (tm) and they could enforce it, rather than relying on 'lashing out' as you say.
Okay fine. And your solution to that is to repeat the exact same mistake by trying to fight over the same term?
On some level, you have to know that the phrase Open Source has value. That's why companies want to use it. That's why they're arguing over broadening the definition and calling the OSI a gatekeeper. They want to be able to use that phrase because it has positive connotations. It's not a linguistic debate, it's a debate over being able to imply that some software is Free even when it's not.
If you think that the OSI made a mistake by picking an existing phrase, that's a totally valid criticism you can have, but as a community we're still not going to let you redefine the phrase. We've invested in this. Take your own advice and come up with a new word for these new licenses.
This topic has turned up recently on HN. [0][1] Your position here matches my own: open source is a precise term of art in the software community, the way flap is a precise term of art in aviation. [1] Trademarks are not especially relevant, and neither is the early history of the term.
To put it in legalistic terms: you can face legal consequences for false advertising despite making no use of trademarked language. The court will not be interested in the etymology of the words you used, that's an academic matter, it's the modern meaning that counts.
Doesn't matter though, I will still call a spade - "spade". You can keep calling a shovel - "spade", just don't be surprised that no one understands what you mean.
You're right, but that misses the point, they put in the work to define and promote the term over a span of more than 20 years. If your plan is to undo that 20 years worth of work, you had better be prepared to take on the same amount of work over the same time span, and I hope the only reason it's done is because we can verifiably prove the results will be better for everyone.
The biggest difference in Aesprite's case is a limit on distribution. From their own blog post on the subject:
> [The new EULA] still gives you the possibility to compile and modify the program for your own purposes, but it doesn’t allow you to redistribute Aseprite.
Fully open source licenses do not restrict the end user's freedoms in this way; rather, they generally encourage (and sometimes require) sharing source code modifications so the larger community can benefit from your work. This tends to be at odds with some commercial models (especially the "sell copies of software" model) so there's much debate about when each type of license is most appropriate.
As mentioned, this is an unmaintained fork of Aseprite which went "shared source" in 2016. If you want an actual open source, actually maintained, pixel art program I recommend GrafX2: http://grafx2.chez.com The major drawback is UI may not be "modern" enough for zoomer tastes, as it's based on old PC/Amiga painting programs, most notably Deluxe Paint. But I liked it so much I contributed code to it (a bugfix to get it working on NetBSD).
Since Aseprite has come a long way since then, interested parties might want to check there instead. It's free to compile from source, or binaries are $20 on steam. (But it's not libre free - IIRC the only restriction is that you're not allowed to redistribute the source.)
https://www.aseprite.org/