PanoTools:
Re: PTGui 5.0beta3
JD Smith 2005-Sep-13 20:10:41
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 09:11:58 +0200, Joost Nieuwenhuijse wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> A new beta of PTGui is now available at: http://www.ptgui.com/beta.html
>
> Most problems of the previous beta should be fixed now, and this version
> is much faster.
PTGui seems to have made some major strides with this release, neatly
incorporating the best of PanoTools/PTStitcher/Enblend/AutoPano-SIFT,
etc. into one streamlined package. While I appreciate the hard work
put into such an optimized tool, I can't help but feel that our
community's permissive "look the other way" stance regarding the
commercial front-ends' use of the GPL'd PanoTools (in technical
violation of that license) has finally come back to bite us in the
worst possible way.
Essentially, a powerful yet poorly integrated collection of GPL'd
tools has been reimplemented as closed source, and it appears to be
better in several ways. I'm not aware of the implementation details
of PTGui's new functionality, but it is absolutely obvious to me that
at the very least it inherited a great deal of motivation and context
from the free tools Enblend, PanoTools, AutoPano-sift etc. But rather
than working to improve and better integrate these existing open
source packages, contributing directly to the shared resources the
community has built, the tool has taken an entire branch of
development behind closed doors. I can certainly see the motivation
to do this, and I don't begrudge the hard work it represents, but to
me it is a painful example of what happens when free software licenses
are not actively enforced. With their code and concepts out in the
open, it is easy to borrow from open tools; going in the other
direction -- borrowing ideas from closed tools -- is nearly
impossible.
I, like everyone here, enjoy the art of panorama creation, and don't
want to get too bogged down in the technical and political details,
but I can imagine that if the community had from the very beginning
been diligent about enforcing the permitted usage of PanoTools and its
satellites, we'd be in a very different position today.
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