Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of 2D Cut-Out Animation System

[Loic Dachary]

Viva La_Résistance writes:

 > code (all of the text files). I've also included a DOS binary copy of 
 > TRACE.EXE because it requires the Allegro game library (giftware ... closer 
 > to public domain than GPL) to compile and you might have some trouble doing 
 > that.

        The license says: this only apply to the stub. I'm not sure what
the stub is. It's always a pain to figure out the license terms of a 
software :-}

 > I also sent some animation source code (party.txt for a really complex 
 > piece, kids.txt for a medium-level piece, and cone.txt for a very simple 
 > piece ... the other .TXT files are still-pictures of various characters).
 > 
 > For party.txt, there is a soundtrack, but it is very big and doesn't 
 > compress well (already being in mp2 format), so I didn't include it.
 > 
 > Regardless of BMP2AVI being free or not, it is a windows-only application, 
 > and that's reason enough to find an alternative. For now, I've been using a 
 > hacked copy of the MSSG MPEG-2 encoder to go directly from .bmp to MPEG1/2. 
 > There are 2 problems with this:
 > 1) Although the MSSG encoder is open source (not sure about it being free), 
 > the MPEG format is covered by patents requiring the payment of royalties.
 > 2) On the technical level, it would be better to output an uncompressed 
 > video file first, and then compress it later.

        It's probably easier to think about software being Free Software,
as defined in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, only if its 
license is listed in http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.
If the license is not listed then you could try to find out if it's Free
Software or not but that will require a fair amount of time and thinking.

        A software could be released under a license approved by the OSI
(Open Source Initiative) that does not qualify as Free Software. 

        Note that we prefer to think in term of Free Software because
we belong to this movement. The Open Source movement has different goals
that we find problematic in many ways.

 > I've been searching for quite a while for a free program that will accept a 
 > bunch of numbered .bmp files and output an uncompressed video file and have 
 > found nothing. When I first wrote my animation program, I kind of assumed 
 > that such programs must be widely available (how else would graphics 
 > programs create video ... have each video format hard-coded into the 
 > program? [unfortanetly, that seems to be the case for a lot of professional 
 > programs]).

        This is a field I don't master and won't be able to help. You might
want to ask people of the videolan.org team ? Or maybe people working at
nevrax.org.

 > If this utility does in fact not exist in a free form, it might be very 
 > useful to the community if I wrote such a program to convert uncompressed 
 > graphics files to uncompressed video files (and since the animation program 
 > is finshed, not counting the documentation that I'm in the process of 
 > writing, I'll have the time to do it).

        It would be good that you write a Free Software if none exist, or
help enhance one that exists.

        Cheers,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
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