[versteegen]

Wow, starting with an unusable license with the intention to switch to a more practical one later is a weird strategy. I guess that's one way to discourage people from adopting it before it's ready.

(Edit: As I clarified, I meant usable for adoption in other non-GPL projects. But OK, I deserve the downvotes for adding very little, and will think twice before posting such a reply next time)

[bryanlarsen]

Starting with a more restrictive one leaves his options open; moving from restrictive to liberal is a lot easier than moving from liberal to restrictive.

[snuxoll]

Erm, what? If you have ANY contributors other than your core project team going from a restrictive to a more liberal license requires agreement from all of them, as they ALL have copyright somewhere in the project.

The opposite, going from something like MIT or BSD doesn't require ANYONE to be okay with it, the license permits it.

[bryanlarsen]

There's only one author, that's not the problem.

My point was, if he had released his code as MIT/BSD and then wanted to change it to GPL it would be fairly ineffective -- people could still use the old MIT/BSD version in their proprietary products.

[bildung]

> Wow, starting with an unusable license

If you want to use it commercially without publishing source, just buy a licence from the author. Buying licences isn't exactly uncommon. Or are OS X/iOS/Windows also unusable for you?

[legulere]

The author claims it to be royalty free. Also commercial "standards" by one party are worthless

[bildung]

> The author claims it to be royalty free.

And the author delivered: With GPL3 source.

> Also commercial "standards" by one party are worthless

Very true, but I can't see how that applies to this project? First, the existence of this repository doesn't preclude proper standardization. Second, the reference implementation is freely licensed, not commercial.

[dspillett]

I think it has more to do with maintain control initially.

It is a lot easier to restrict now and liberalise later once more thought has been given to the options, than it is to draw things back in later if you decide you want more control for any reason.

[davexunit]

>unusable license

Pure bullshit. Unusable for whom? Proprietary software developers? That's the intent.

[brianwawok]

Except... how does a new image format work in modern browsers? It gets included in Chrome, IE, Safari, and Firefox.

Apple and Google won't touch GPLv3, so that means this image format is dead on arrival as a web format.

Sure you can use it locally to compress your photographs, cool. But it won't be a web standard with GPLv3.

[kuschku]

Well, we could just get everyone to use Firefox, and this image format will be a web standard.

Google is currently using webp everywhere, too, despite no major browser actually supporting webp.

(I do not consider Chrome a browser, but mal- and spyware)

[versteegen]

Not really propriety software - as you & bildung said, it's not a problem if you can just buy a license. I meant anyone working on FLOSS software that isn't GPL compatible, which is probably most FLOSS software. MIT, BSD, etc are very popular these days. And image formats are generally intended to be widely-adopted standards used across different applications.

[yarrel]

Most "FLOSS" software is GPL. Almost all is GPL compatible.

But even the FSF recommend sometimes using don't-care-about-user-freedom licenses for strategic reasons, for example driving adoption of a new free codec...

[lucian1900]

Or any open source project that is not GPLv3, like Firefox.

[TuringTest]

Firefox is GPLv3 compatible. It's quite likely that it will support this format - although, if it's the only major browser doing so, it will not be adopted by most web publishers.

[anon1385]

I would be very surprised if Firefox added support. They have been very reluctant to include any additional image formats that weren't developed by Mozilla employees. See for example WebP and Jpeg2000.

Their reasons being things like added security risk, lack of demand, lack of support in other browsers, patent risk etc, which all apply just as much to this format.

[MichaelGG]

Hopefully adopting Rust code will eliminate the security risk for such decisions.

[legulere]

The Mozilla Public License is GPLv3 compatible. Firefox also contains code that is under different licenses that is not GPLv3 compatible, and thus firefox is not GPLv3 compatible

[VMG]

You agreeing with the intent does not negate the effect.