LibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor

https://libresprite.github.io/

154•nicoloren•7h ago

Comments

whywhywhywhy•6h ago

Begging open source projects to stop with the libre<name> convention, it's awkward to say, it's cringe and seems to spiritually doom a project to fail.

PowerElectronix•6h ago

That's like asking a EU product to not be named Euro-{product}.

whywhywhywhy•3h ago

Also cringe and tainted.

Dwedit•6h ago

One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.

bbkane•1h ago

To me that sounds awesome

   func RebootItAll()

progx•5h ago

LibreOffice ?

notachatbot123•5h ago

Yes, that is one of the major offenders. It is very awkward to pronounce in many languages.

kalterdev•5h ago

I speak two languages (English and Russian) and have never found their name to be awkward. This is the first time, actually, that I've seen somebody say they don't like their name.

notachatbot123•3h ago

A good indicator is that the Wikipedia page even has pronounciation information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

What other major software has that?

bloak•2h ago

> What other major software has that?

Linux?

EDIT: Also Qt, MySQL, SQLite, GIMP (rather unnecessarily), ...

desdenova•4h ago

Curious on what languages have a hard time saying Libre.

Every latin-derived language (which are most of the western languages) can pronounce it naturally, and even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood (even though they're incapable of pronouncing the non-retroflex `r`).

zimpenfish•36m ago

> even English speakers can approximate it well enough to be understood

I'd go for "LEE-broffis" which I don't think is all that hideously far away?

madduci•5h ago

At least they signal that the project is open and free. What about projects using "Open" but they aren't? (See: OpenAI)

kleiba•4h ago

The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

m12k•4h ago

I just wish more of these projects would be a bit more ambitious and put more focus in their communication on being good at what they do, rather than being free and made by idealists. They're branding themselves in a way that only really appeals to other techy idealists, while accidentally putting off a lot of potential users who are neither technical nor philosophical enough to know or care what a term like libre means. There's a lot of good, free software that is selling itself short by communicating more about being the latter than the former.

kleiba•4h ago

I think there's some truth to what you say - at the same time, a lot of successful products have names that basically have no meaning at all, or at least none that's related to what the project actually does ("Windows", "Cursor", "Firefox", etc...)

Of course, a point could be made that any inoffensive but basically fluffy name is still better than a geeky sounding tech babble name...

lukan•3h ago

The most succesful open source projects (firefox, blender, linux, krita,..) do not have libre in their name, the most famous of those who have is probably libreoffice, but it is not exactly loved.

So I totally agree on rather having a name that appeals normal users, than a certain tech bubble who will rather use the terminal wherever they can anyway ..

kleiba•3h ago

Hey, no terminal shaming here!

abirch•4h ago

Almost any name is better than GIMP.

pawelmurias•1h ago

It would be impossible to come up with a name that reflected the nature of the gimp program better.

krige•5h ago

Haven't used LibreSprite but Aseprite, from which it forked, has been an enormous boon to me, for pixel arting it definitely fits my habits and abilities much better than anything else I tried (GIMP, Krita, GrafX2, actual DPaint, Digipaint...).

zackchen•5h ago

This looks like Aseprite. Aseprite is already open source and you can get it for free, all completely legal. The only caveat is that you need to compile it yourself (which takes 2-5 shell commands). I think this is more than fair, but ripping off Aseprite is not so much. Their license also strictly prohibits that behavior.

erk__•5h ago

The history section of the repo clears it up [0]

> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.

> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.

Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.

[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...

whizzter•5h ago

Same old story, too much support requests and bad actors making it hard to make money off opensource.

This is one case where we really should support the original product, you can buy a perpetual licence of a pittance and they just 2 guys chugging along.

LibreSprite has 5000 commits, 30 in the past year whilst ASEPrite has over 10000 at this point.

chrysoprace•4h ago

The person you're replying to was making a clarification on the license, not arguing about the validity of changing the license or charging for it.

Libresprite is an important project because people can fork it and learn from it by extending it, and submit those patches upstream, regardless of how active it is.

mort96•2h ago

I think aseprite is a perfectly fine project, but where possible, I like to use open source tools rather than proprietary tools.

1313ed01•4h ago

I have paid for Aseprite, but on many machines I just install the old GPL version, usually available as a package. It is fine for most tasks, even if the latest version has many improvements.

A fork of the old version to have a slightly better version conveniently available in package repos would be nice. I don't think it has to catch up with Aseprite to be useful.

enlyth•5h ago

Aseprite is such a joy to use that I paid for it just to support the developers

Aeolun•3h ago

It’s also really cheap!

vunderba•1h ago

Agreed, and it's also available on Steam! I really like the way they handle onion skinning as well, and there's a surprising number of useful plugins (such as tweencel) for it.

ROllerozxa•4h ago

Aseprite is source available nowadays, not open source. Libresprite was then forked off of the last commit of Aseprite before the license was changed from the GPL.

paxys•2h ago

1. Asperite is not open source.

2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.

lachieh•1h ago

Aseprite is open source. The source is open for anyone to access right here: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

You might be confusing license with access. The product itself has a proprietary license. Even then, a majority of the libraries they produce are also available under the MIT license.

pocketarc•1h ago

"open source" has a specific definition[0], which this project does not meet. When people say "open source", that is the definition that they are referencing. It's the reason why there's been endless discussion about "open weights" models not being "open source".

"source available"[1] is a different thing, and you're right that this project is "source available".

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

juliangmp•1h ago

How can you say its open source and 3 sentences later that it has a proprietary license.

Their EULA forbids distributing the software, hence not open source.

paxys•1h ago

You are describing source available. That is not the same as open source.

txrx0000•5h ago

I spent weeks building something I could have paid $30M for and I'd do it again

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