PanoTools:
Re: Re: PTGui 5.0beta3
Fulvio Senore 2005-Sep-13 23:40:30
JD,
let me disagree. First you are talking about "a powerful yet poorly
integrated collection of GPL'd tools", but PTStitcher is not open
source, and Autopano-SIFT came after Autopano that is not open source,
and the SIFT algorithm is patented, so your argument seems to be a
little weak.
Panorama Tools has become a popular software only because somebody wrote
two closed source front ends (hugin came later). Nobody in this planet
would have used PT without front ends, so it does not seem to me that
front ends have only taken without giving.
JD Smith ha scritto:
>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 cannot understand why this is such a problem to you: those softwares
still exist, and you can keep using them. It seems that, since enblend
has been the first program to do such a work, everybody should keep
updating enblend instead of writing a similar program from scratch. I
have worked at enblend for some time, trying to speed it up, then I gave
up when I tried smartblend (btw, why didn't you complain about
smartblend? It's closed and it works better than enblend in many cases).
Since enblend 2 has not been designed with performance as a major goal,
speeding it up is probably harder than writing another program. And I
can assure you that enblend's working is not so complicated: the most
difficult part is finding a transition line, and smartblend seems to do
a better task.
So it is no surprise that other programs can do similar things: enblend
has the great merit of being the first to do a thing that nobody tried
before, but it is based on previous works anyway.
If Ford builds a car GM builds another, and nobody complains about it.
> I can certainly see the motivation
>to do this, and I don't begrudge the hard work it represents,
>
I am not sure that you really understand the amount of work that lies
behind ptgui. Writing the interface requires MUCH more work than writing
the working part of a program. I suppose that Joost has put in ptgui
many times the time that has been put in the other tools that have no
user interface. I cannot see the problem if he asks a small amount of
money (he will not surely get rich with it) for his program. Since
nobody (I think) is manually writing PT scripts I suppose that most
people agree with it.
> but to
>me it is a painful example of what happens when free software licenses
>are not actively enforced.
>
To me, it seems a consequence of all the whining that has been made in
this list some months ago about licenses enforcement. PTGui is going
towards a "no need for Panorama Tools" direction, and I think that a
good reason is to avoid licensing problems. Now, if somebody will keep
whining about licenses, Joost will be able to drop PT support to avoid
problems. This does not seem to be a great result, to me.
> 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 don't know what you mean with "borrow from open tools". As a
programmer I can say that the what is important is knowing the
algorithm, for example Panorama Tools is mainly an application of
geometry knowledge, and you can find that knowledge in many books.
Having access to the source code does not give a great advantage, unless
you simply copy it, but it is usually impossible to simply copying code
from a program into another so is is simpler to rewrite it.
>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.
>
>
I agree, enforcing the license would have meant no front ends for years,
and without front ends nobody would be using PanoTools. This would a
very different situation.
I suppose that we could keep writing about this for days, so let me say
that I have written enough. I will not clutter the list with other
messages about this topic since I hope that I have explained well my
thoughts. No need to flame.
Fulvio Senore
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