Lightworks Video Editor To Go Open Source 205
Art3x writes "EditShare will release its video editor as open source this summer. Lightworks handles high-definition media, DPX, and RED, shares projects with Final Cut Pro and Avid, and was recently used by Academy-award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker on Shutter Island. Introduced in 1989 and bought by EditShare last year, it 'has come from over one million hours of software development,' says EditShare's James Richings. But he says releasing the source will 'generate concepts and capabilities never seen before. I expect that the Lightworks Open Source initiative will transform not only the technology, but also the opinions on what a professional editing tool can achieve.'" From the press release's description, it sounds like the "open source" phase will follow a period of free-as-in-beer downloading.
open source pixi dust? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they going to continue to provide developers and push some form of direction?
From what I've seen the only successful OS projects are grown from scratch or 50%+ maintained by a single company.
Nothing good will probably come of this (Score:2, Insightful)
Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid (Score:5, Insightful)
Currently we work on Avid Media Composer, since it remains the only true pro-level editing software. Final Cut has it's pros but, at least to me, it's more for video editing (by which I mean not sourcing or finishing to film) and smaller projects (promos, commercials, shorts). If you want to cut a feature film - you use Avid. I have arguments with co-workers about FCP versus Avid but we usually arrive at the agreement that Avid is simply the standard to which all other systems are currently judged.
With the open sourcing of Lightworks I can only hope that the best of modern systems like Avid and FCP can be integrated with the very intuitive Lightworks way of working. At the very least, I hope it scares Avid and Apple at least enough to make them fix some of the problems that currently exist with their systems. More competition is always better for the end user.
geek-bait? (Score:2, Insightful)
Translation:
It sounds like the "open source" hype, in combination with a free-as-in-beer download, will win massive marketshare, followed by the release of a "premium" version to capitalize on that.
Note that this works whether it's released as (netscape-style) open-source, or whether that promise fades away -- as long as everybody got their free copy, and knows that open-source is "around the corner", you can go quite a long way without a shred of code released.
Re:What platform does this run on? (Score:2, Insightful)
Two things I noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
I would guess that there is a Windows version and since it seems to integrate with Final Cut Pro, a Mac version seems likely as well, but there is no way to be sure and strangely, I could not find anything.
Also, it seems that Lightworks was only recently (August 2009) acquired by EditShare. Making it OpenSource now could mean that EditShare maybe was not able or willing to continue developing, selling and supporting the program and now tries to salvage something by open-sourcing it, hoping the community will pick up the slack.
Re:Nothing good will probably come of this (Score:5, Insightful)
the company more or less considers the tool to be dead.
OR... the company realizes that the benefits of crowd sourcing the application far outweigh the potential monetary gains of keeping it closed source. If the company releases it via BSD license and then develops and sells closed source plugins for the architecture, the massive adoption of the core software will springboard their new plugin products. As the developers of the software, they are best positioned to be the leader in plugin development for this project.
So, the cynical view that the application is dead completely ignores the possibility that it may simply be more profitable for them to open source it.
Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you wanna sum up, then you should sum up the times the license is used. And in the long run GPL might come ahead as it will always keep scoring 3 points whereas BSD will score 0 points once it gets closed by some vendor.
Or instead of thinking what the license gives to the developer, maybe we should give more value on what it gives to the user. With GPL the user will always get the same rights as the developer had, with BSD they can be taken away.
Also BSD does have nasty limitations, it forces me to retain a copyright notice and other things. Public domain type of license could contain even more freedom.
Re:Nothing good will probably come of this (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, if they've decided to go the open source route, EditShare has effectively acknowledged that the tool provides them little commercial value, and that in turn implies that the company more or less considers the tool to be dead.
I'm sure people on Slashdot can remember many technologies, operating systems or applications which, while great, didn't really have the chance to take off; or died untimely death due to factors external from the product itself.
Even if this tool can be considered "dead" commercially (as far as selling it goes), it can still have bright times ahead once freed.
Re:Two things I noticed (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, it seems that Lightworks was only recently (August 2009) acquired by EditShare. Making it OpenSource now could mean that EditShare maybe was not able or willing to continue developing, selling and supporting the program and now tries to salvage something by open-sourcing it, hoping the community will pick up the slack.
That's not necessarily a bad thing though, look at blender :) That's taken off like fireweed!
Re:What platform does this run on? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba (Score:3, Insightful)
Chrome is also a bad example. It's based on WebKit, and portions of WebKit are under the LGPL. I doubt they've stripped out and rewritten all of WebCore.
Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses. (Score:4, Insightful)
> Why do you label him a "troll"? What he says is absolutely true; the MIT and BSD licenses are basically the most-free licenses around.
And pointless.
They could have merely put the source in the public domain if they wanted things to be a free-for-all.
The main benefit of a non Mad Max approach to Free Software is that it gives more developers a better incentive to contribute as they can be sure that their contributions won't be gobbled up by some company and then used against them. People like to forget that this is why the GPL came about in the first place. RMS didn't just decided to go on an ideological tear. His own contributors gave him grief when they found out that their work had been commercialized without their knowledge.
The GPL is a result of a failure of more open licensing.
Re:Great something (Score:5, Insightful)
if I can't figure out how to import and splice clips in less than 30 minutes of picking up a copy of your video editing software, I conclude that the software is no good.
I have the same attitude with all products: if I can't figure it out in 30 minutes, without consulting a manual (see below), I just give up.
Incidentally, I can't read, write, swim, drive or ride a bicycle. I assume none of those things is any good.
Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid (Score:3, Insightful)
List of features [editshare.com] certainly looks nice (it would be even better to see some presentation; I haven't found much, too niche it seems...plus now search results are swamped with this news). For somebody who is generally fine with Sony Vegas + some nice color grading plugin, this almost looks too good to be true...
Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses. (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly, the freedom you get with the MIT and BSD licenses exceeds that which you'd get from the GPL.
It's not a different amount of freedom, it's a different quality, with different goals. BSD is "I want everyone to use this". GPL is "I want everyone to get the updates". We can argue about which one is better all day, but unless you understand both philosophies, it's pointless.
BSD takes into account the fact that all software can be better by using known good code. GPL takes into account the fact that writing good software is not about the code but the process that leads to the code.
Re:Orwellian Style GNU Doublespeak (Score:4, Insightful)
> What a bunch of retards.
>
> Do you GNU idiots actually think anyone is falling for your lame attempts at word games to cover up your shitty viral license?
I was thinking the exact same thing about you lot that have a notion of "freedom" that neglects human nature.
Re:Great something (Score:1, Insightful)
My excuse is learn the proprietary software by pirating it, and then if I have a need for it in a business case, I buy it. I've gotten 3 different employers to buy a copy of the adobe suite. Without pirating it and playing with it during college, I never would have been in a position to recommend and get it bought.
Re:The entire complier tech world is laughing at y (Score:3, Insightful)
One of my friends tried to implement some sort of Scheme-like system language, he had rather strict requirements and he found the LLVM IR model deficient - tail calls, continuation, type system...I can't remember now what exactly was the problem, it was a few years ago - but perhaps they have extended it by now.
"Type system" complaint doesn't make much sense, to be honest. LLVM is really just "portable assembly". Type system? It offers the basic primitive types, aggregates thereof (arrays, structs), and pointers to them. That is sufficient to build a data structure of any complexity. Any actual type system of your language would be entirely separate, and may not even trivially map to any of LLVM types - the latter are implementation details.
With respect to tail calls, LLVM has them - unlike C, and that one is actually a big deal because you really have to have tailcall support even on such a low level, because it is something that cannot be efficiently worked around (you can do it if you provide your own call stack, which is obviously not efficient).
Continuations? If we're talking about full-fledged re-invokable ones (which is what call/cc is), then you can't have them without spaghetti stack, anyway - meaning that you have to ignore whatever the platform (and therefore LLVM) provide you, and roll out your own. If it's just a rewinding facility, then LLVM has it.
To sum it up: if you can write a compiler of some language to assembly, you most assuredly can write a compiler for the same language to LLVM.
Re:Great something (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not really a fair analogy. It's probably more like, "I've been driving a car for twenty years. If I get into your car and can't figure out how to turn it on, pull out of the parking place and drive somewhere within thirty minutes, I conclude that the car is no good."
Basic cut-and-splice video editing is a very simple process. In a good user interface, the actions a user must take to perform any simple and common task should be both discoverable and simple. Any software in which such functionality is difficult or undiscoverable is badly written software, period. You really should not need to read a manual for such basic usage unless the UI is unintuitive, which makes it, by definition, bad software. That's not saying that you should be able to be a power user in thirty minutes. You might not figure out every esoteric feature in thirty minutes, but you should be able to at least get most of the basics.
To go back to your bicycle example, this is like not being able to figure out how to raise the kickstand in the first thirty minutes. If you find that this is the case, something is massively wrong, and unless the user is a complete and total idiot, it's probably the UI.
Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses. (Score:3, Insightful)
Clearly not oh trollish one. The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.
I don't know how I will modded but GPL is "NOT" for end users. It does not affect end users one bit. End users do not compile or care to compile code.
Unfortunately, there is no (-1, Wrong) moderation. The GPL is for protection of users. It gives the users the right to receive, modify, and redistribute the code. You can see it is for protection of users because it gives these rights only to the users, i.e. the recipients of the binary code. As a programmer who is not the user, you are not entitled to receive the code from the distributor, because they did not distribute the binary to you.
If you are contributing to the codebase then you are no longer wearing the "end user" hat but a "contributing developer" hat.
This is provably false. You are, rather, wearing two hats at once.
BSD and MIT license grant more rights to third party developers. Full stop.
Artistic and similar licenses grant rights to everyone, while GPL grants rights to users. Full stop. It's right there in the licenses. By default works are covered by copyright. Artistic licenses say anyone can do as they like but you must give credit. GPL says recipients of the program can do as they like. The source code is considered to be the program as well (as it should be) so recipients of the source are granted the same rights as recipients of the binary. Except, of course, clauses about providing source don't apply, since there's no source to the source.
GPL takes the approach of enforcement of rules if you want to play while BSD relies on good will and a desire to co-operate.
False. Both are powered by copyright, and thus both depend on the enforcement of rules.
One requires coercion and the other is completely voluntary.
Both are completely voluntary. Nobody is forcing you to use either license when you distribute software you have written. BSD and GPL licenses only grant rights! They take nothing away. One license, however, provably provides more freedom for end users, and that license is the GPL, because it requires distributors of binaries to provide machine-readable sources as well. Remember, the GPL came from the desire to modify a printer driver. We're talking about an end-user here. GPL reduces the rights of the author (rights under copyright law) but increases the rights of the end user. Full stop.</snarky>