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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
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.
