Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by davexunit 3911 days ago
>unusable license

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

4 comments

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.

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)

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.
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...

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

Hopefully adopting Rust code will eliminate the security risk for such decisions.
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
You agreeing with the intent does not negate the effect.